Strengthening US Food Policies and Programs to Promote Equity in Nutrition Security: A Policy Statement From the American Heart Association.

Nutritionally inadequate dietary intake is a leading contributor to chronic cardiometabolic diseases. Differences in dietary quality contribute to socioeconomic and racial and ethnic health disparities. Food insecurity, a household-level social or economic condition of limited access to sufficient food, is a common cause of inadequate dietary intake. Although US food assistance policies and programs are designed to improve food security, there is growing consensus that they should have a broader focus on nutrition security. In this policy statement, we define nutrition security as an individual or household condition of having equitable and stable availability, access, affordability, and utilization of foods and beverages that promote well-being and prevent and treat disease. Despite existing policies and programs, significant gaps remain for achieving equity in nutrition security across the life span. We provide recommendations for expanding and improving current food assistance policies and programs to achieve nutrition security. These recommendations are guided by several overarching principles: emphasizing nutritional quality, improving reach, ensuring optimal utilization, improving coordination across programs, ensuring stability of access to programs across the life course, and ensuring equity and dignity for access and utilization. We suggest a critical next step will be to develop and implement national measures of nutrition security that can be added to the current US food security measures. Achieving equity in nutrition security will require coordinated and sustained efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. Future advocacy, innovation, and research will be needed to expand existing food assistance policies and programs and to develop and implement new policies and programs that will improve cardiovascular health and reduce disparities in chronic disease.

The need for agriculture phenotyping: "moving from genotype to phenotype".

Increase in the world population has called for the increased demand for agricultural productivity. Traditional methods to augment crop and animal production are facing exacerbating pressures in keeping up with population growth. This challenge has in turn led to the transformational change in the use of biotechnology tools to meet increased productivity for both plant and animal systems. Although many challenges exist, the use of proteomic techniques to understand agricultural problems is steadily increasing. This review discusses the impact of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenotypes on plant, animal and bacterial systems to achieve global food security and safety and we highlight examples of intra and extra mural research work that is currently being done to increase agricultural productivity. BIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE: This review focuses on the global demand for increased agricultural productivity arising from population growth and how we can address this challenge using biotechnology. With a population well above seven billion humans, in a very unbalanced nutritional state (20% overweight, 20% risking starvation) drastic measures have to be taken at the political, infrastructure and scientific levels. While we cannot influence politics, it is our duty as scientists to see what can be done to feed humanity. Hence we highlight the transformational change in the use of biotechnology tools over traditional methods to increase agricultural productivity (plant and animal). Specifically, this review deals at length on how a three-pronged attack, namely combined genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, can help to ensure global food security and safety. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Translational Plant Proteomics.