The research described in this article was made possible in part by federal funding awarded to Harvard Chan School scientists in the interest of protecting and promoting health for all. The future of research like this is now in question due to the government’s actions to terminate large numbers of grants and contracts and freeze funding for scientific inquiry and innovation across Harvard University.
Erica Kenney, associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, leads a team working to figure out how to help families, particularly children, eat nutritious foods. Here, she discusses how federal grant terminations may impact this research and its potential to support people’s health across the life course.
Q: How do you take a public health approach to trying to get people to eat healthier?
A: Poor diet is driving an enormous and growing burden of debilitating chronic diseases that cause premature deaths, including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. Just telling people over and over again to eat better, which is sort of our default mode, is not really a winning strategy. Changing how and what we eat is a really complicated thing for most people. Food is so bound up in our biology, our psychology, our cultural traditions, and our social lives, and our food system is set up right now with an eye toward getting people to keep eating foods that hit our pleasure centers but are terrible for our health. Because of this, public health researchers need to approach the question of how to help people eat better with scientific rigor.
My team uses social, behavioral, and econometric approaches to try to find solutions that have a positive impact on public health nutrition at scale. We focus particularly on nutrition in children, both because we want to help children be healthier and because of the long-term implications of poor nutrition for the public’s cardiometabolic health. We partner with local and national community and government organizations—Massachusetts WIC, Boston Public Schools, the Urban School Food Alliance, the Greater Boston Food Bank, and others—to find evidence-based solutions to poor nutrition and food insecurity among children. Those organizations are out there in the trenches, working to get people in poverty access to nutritious foods, figuring out how to make healthy school lunches on limited budgets, or training childcare providers on how to budget for buying more fruits and vegetables. We study whether and how policies, programs, and other strategies like these change eating habits or improve food access.
Q: How important has National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding been for your work?
A: It’s been everything. All of our research was funded by either the NIH or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To do interdisciplinary, community-engaged, strategic science like ours, you need talented, committed people with unique skillsets. Without federal funding, that team goes away. Importantly, NIH funding has also supported the stipends of postdocs working with our team. By investing in postdocs, NIH was investing in super-promising early career scientists, setting them on a path for conducting effective research to improve Americans’ health in the future. It’s a total waste that the administration has halted its investment and stopped these postdocs’ career trajectories in their tracks.
Q: Could you describe one of the grants that was recently terminated?
A: We were just starting a project funded by the CDC’s Prevention Research Center program, a national grant program that funds community-research partnerships around the country. We had planned a project to work with community leaders in nutrition and physical activity for young children, such as the Boston Public Health Commission, to help tailor programs that try to improve food and physical activity for children under five years old in actual childcare settings, not highly controlled research settings. With the loss of funding for the project, we won’t be able to develop a program that works in the real world for helping hardworking childcare providers make healthier meals, and lots of little children in the greater Boston area, especially from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, will miss out on what would have been an opportunity to access healthier meals and physical activity.
Q: What will the loss of federal funding mean for your ability to continue your research?
A: Some areas of my team’s research will have to stop, and the others will be significantly diminished. If we are able to continue our research at all, we may have to do fewer studies and use already collected data, rather than collecting our own data tailored to our research question and our community partners’ needs. Or we may have to forego the qualitative analyses we do, which help us understand the challenges people are facing much better than big data analyses alone. In all cases, we’ll miss out on critical knowledge that could help improve people’s eating habits.
My research is meant to benefit the government and, by extension, taxpayers. We try to find ways to make smart investments in public health nutrition policies and programs that will ultimately save lives and save taxpayer funds by reducing the costs associated with poor health later in life.
