A lack of funding threatens the usefulness of nutrition monitoring data, according to a recent report by the American Society for Nutritional Sciences working group.

But Iowa State’s work may make resources available for further research.

Nutrition Facts labels on foods, growth charts used by pediatricians, and the Thrifty Food Plan used to allot Food Stamps are all being threatened by the lack of funding, said Catherine Woteki, dean of the College of Agriculture.

Woteki said she hopes the report she helped write will preserve resources for researchers at Iowa State.

She said she hopes the report will “alert the Bush administration and the Congress to the importance of these surveys to sound policies on food safety, nutrition, and health.”

Woteki chaired the group that analyzed the nation’s nutrition monitoring program. She said it is important for Congress to appropriate more funding for the program in fiscal year 2003.

“[Without more funding], the data available for policy decisions will be limited, and that will imperil the integrity of government programs,” she said.

Federal policies, programs and research rely on the nutrition monitoring activities conducted by 22 federal agencies. The shared effort to collect information about American nutritional status is the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Program. One of the tools used for gathering nutrition data was the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The survey collected food intake and health status information from 5,000 survey respondents each year before it was combined with another survey with a similar sample size.

In 2002, the survey was combined with another nutrition monitoring program survey, the Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals (CSFII).

According to the report, “the integrated CSFII/NHANES should improve the quality, timeliness and usability of survey data. However, it is not clear that sufficient funds are available to do this.”

The working group recommended that U.S. Congress provide an additional $15 million in funding for the agency that conducts the CSFII/NHANES and authorize new nutrition legislation to deal with public health concerns that have risen since 1990.

The group also recommended Congress provide funding for a federal grants program authorized by 1990 nutrition legislation.

Dr. Grace Marquis, assistant professor of food science and human nutrition, said nationwide surveys like the CSFII/NHANES are vital to research.

“Many of our research questions focus on marginalized populations,” she said.

“[Because these populations are often difficult to sample], a national survey provides a unique opportunity for researchers to access valuable information on these groups.”

Mary Jane Oakland, associate professor of food science and human nutrition, said the nutrition monitoring program surveys are valuable because there are so many unique questions can be answered by analyzing the data.

“We really do have a group on campus who have worked out the methods for analyzing these large databases,” she said.