Dr. Devries Reflects on Participation in the White House Nutrition Conference

In recognition of the nutrition education work including our nutrition CME course offered through the Gaples Institute, I was honored to participate in the invitation-only White House Nutrition Conference held in Washington, DC on September 28.

It was a landmark event—only the second White House Nutrition Conference held since 1969—and it convened a select group of national leaders in nutrition education and advocacy, elected officials, and representatives from anti-hunger agencies throughout the country.

Here are some of my reflections from inside the room where it happened.

The Nutrition Challenges the U.S. is Facing

The original conference more than 50 years ago launched several of our nation’s most impactful and life-changing anti-hunger programs, including the development and/or expansion of school lunch programs, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps), and WIC (Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).

Despite the gains on many fronts, the nutrition landscape in 2022 remains challenging:

• 1 in 10 households are currently food insecure.
• At the same time, many experience an excess of “empty” calories from overconsumption of highly processed foods with low nutritional value.
• As a result, 40% of U.S. adults have obesity and half have either pre-diabetes or diagnosed diabetes.

Clearly, we have significant work to do!

Laying the Groundwork for Change

Prior to the conference, the White House conducted several pre-conference “listening sessions” in which I participated on behalf of the Gaples Institute.

Two of these were private consultative calls to discuss nutrition education with me, as leader of a nationally recognized educational nonprofit dedicated to improving nutrition education for health professionals and their patients.

The listening sessions surfaced the dire need to reduce the burden of diet-related disease with new approaches that utilize food as medicine.

Urging Stronger Nutrition Advocacy

On the day of the Conference, security clearances began at 7 a.m. before the opening address by President Biden. The President was introduced by a young woman whose lived experience of childhood food insecurity underscored the empowering and dramatic impact of federal nutrition programs.

President Biden’s remarks focused on hunger and inequities in food access and affordability. His most memorable line: “If you look at your child and you can’t feed your child, what the hell else matters?”

Who could disagree?

The President emphasized that “Our national strategy also calls for doctors, nurses, and dentists to be trained to spot the signs of hunger.” He was totally on target, as physicians typically aren’t trained to identify patients who are food insecure—and these patients often have no outward signs of being challenged.

I’m proud to say that the Gaples Institute is working to address this often-hidden crisis of food insecurity—the Gaples Institute nutrition course for physicians provides a simple, well-validated two-question screening tool to identify patients who are food insecure. It takes just one minute to perform and has been one of the most highly rated parts of our course.

The balance of the day consisted of a mix of plenary and breakout sessions with speakers including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Representative Jim McGovern, Senator Cory Booker, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and several others.

The Conference emphasized a series of key hunger and nutrition proposals:

 Improving Food Access and Affordability

• Expanding SNAP eligibility to more underserved populations.
• Incentivizing the consumption of fruits and vegetables.
• Improving the quality of school lunches and extending lunch programs throughout the summer break.

Whole Society Responses

• Encouraging state and local governments to attract healthier food outlets to underserved areas.
• A call for meaningful nutrition education for physicians and all health professionals, as described in the landmark U.S. House Resolution 1118 on Nutrition Education in medical training that was adopted in May 2022.

Integrating Nutrition and Health

• Pilot coverage by Medicare of “medically tailored meals” to individuals with chronic diseases. These are meals that not only fulfill caloric requirements, but are specifically designed to address each patient’s unique medical conditions.

Empowering citizens to make and have access to healthy food choices

• On the day of the White House Conference, the FDA released a proposal for new criteria for the “healthy” food label. The new definition requires meaningful amounts of the nutrient-dense food groups and limits unhealthy nutrients like excessive sodium, added sugar, and saturated fat.

Summary:

The plan to address hunger and advance the use of food as medicine rested on 3 central pillars: improving food access, affordability, and knowledge.

A consistent theme of the Conference was that government alone will not be able to meet these objectives and that success will require partnerships with community groups, food companies, and nonprofits.

I was proud to represent the Gaples Institute at the White House Conference and share the progress our nonprofit has made to fortify nutrition education for both public and health professional groups. The Gaples Institute has trained 3,900+ physicians with our health professional nutrition course, and we have issued over 30,000 certificates of completion for our public-facing nutrition course. It’s time that nutrition receives more than lip service in medical training, and that patients insist on care that includes the full range of benefits that healthy eating can deliver.