Trump administration undermines nutrition and health tracking by firing key staff

It should go without saying that if you want to make Americans healthier, you have to have a basic understanding of what they actually eat and how their health is changing over time. So, it’s bewildering that the Trump administration is using the government shutdown as pretext to fire the unit within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that collects this critical data through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

The importance of NHANES for monitoring population health through direct and objective measurements cannot be overstated. Not only is NHANES used in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's analyses (to assess how U.S. diets align with federal nutrition guidance through the Healthy Eating Index, for example), it is also used in developing the Dietary Reference Intakes which set nutrient recommendations for individuals in the U.S. and Canada. NHANES data has also been used to track the rates of certain health conditions and to provide population reference statistics.  

Despite mouthing encouraging words about tackling chronic, diet-related disease, this administration’s actions almost always put real solutions further out of reach. The firing of the NHANES staff is another example, and an indication that the administration would rather push its political agenda than collect the data necessary to address the very real problems it has identified.