The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) provides nutritious foods, information on healthy eating including breastfeeding promotion and support, and referrals to health care to over 6.3 million low-income pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding women, infants, and children up to age 5 in the US. Nutrition Policy Institute's (NPI) Lorrene Ritchie is the Co-Principal Investigator of the national WIC Infant and Toddler Feeding Practices Study-2 (ITFPS-2), which received additional funding from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in partnership with Westat, Inc. to extend data collection for children up to 9 years of age enrolled in the national WIC Infant and Toddler Feeding Practices Study-2 (ITFPS-2). Ritchie and her NPI research team will contribute to the investigation of dietary practices and the health and nutritional status of children in this cohort during their ninth year of life. This project builds off the WIC ITFPS-2 study funded by the USDA Food and Nutrition Services, which began in 2011. The study extension begins in October 2020 and continues for five years.

Nutrition Policy Institute's Wendi Gosliner was awarded a $439,345 California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Specialty Crop Block Grant to partner with Impact Justice and ChangeLab Solutions to increase demand for California-grown fruits, vegetables and nuts in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) state prisons. The CDCR is the largest California state food purchaser, with over $150 million in purchases annually. The project will educate CDCR stakeholders about the benefits of procuring and serving more California grown specialty crops; work with stakeholders to develop policy and systems-level changes to promote procurement of California grown specialty crops; and work with formerly incarcerated individuals to understand opportunities and barriers to increasing consumption of California grown specialty crops in CDCR facilities and to provide them with nutrition education. The project broadly will reach 120,000 incarcerated people. The two-year project begins November 2020.

Daily physical activity supports youth physical and phychosocial health and is also important for obesity prevention. Schools are an important location for physical activity promotion and obesity prevention given youth spend up to half of their waking hours in school. The latest study from Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI) researchers suggests that United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed, and known asCalFresh Healthy Living (CFHL) in California) physical activity interventions at school-sites are associated with slightly lower body mass index (BMI) and greater cardiovascular fitness in students compared to sites that did not receive these interventions. Further, schools with higher intervention levels had students with the highest cardiovascular fitness levels. Interventions included physical activity-related direct education, where students were actively engaged with an educator; indirect education, where students received information or resources related to physical activity; or changes to the school or district's physical activity related policies, systems, and/or environments (PSE). Student-level FitnessGram(R) data from between 2015-2016 was obtained from the California Department of Education for the study. Researchers compared BMI and student cardiovascular fitness levels from over 97,000 fifth and seventh grade students from 904 California public schools that implemented the SNAP-Ed physical activity interventions to over 372,000 fifth and seventh grade students from 3,506 California public schools that did not implement the interventions. These findings are important as the California Department of Public Health's Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Branch distributes over $50 million in CFHL funding to local health departments to implement physical activity and nutrition interventions, which primarily occur in the public school setting. Also, California has more public schools than any other US state. The study was published online in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports. The study was conducted by NPI's Hannah Thompson, Sridharshi Hewawitharana, Janice Kao, Carolyn Rider, Evan Talmage, Wendi Gosliner and Gail Woodward-Lopez in collaboration with Lauren Whetstone of the California Department of Public Health. The study was funded by the California Department of Public Health, with funding from the USDA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The full study is available online.

Lorrene Ritchie, director and UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) specialist at the University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI), Hannah Thompson, NPI epidemiologist and research scientist at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and Marisa Neelon, UCCE nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisor, were quoted in an October 12, 2020 article in The Daily Californian titled "UC Berkeley study shows intervention affect school lunch participation." The article highlights a collaborative three-year study with San Francisco Unified School District Student Nutrition Services (SFUSD SNS) to evaluate a dining redesign intervention with the goal of increasing school lunch participation among SFUSD middle and high school students. The article highlights research findings that were published in two journals, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and Childhood Obesity. Dr. Thompson is quoted, “While interventions helped stave off the decline of student lunch participation, a big conclusion of this study is that larger economic policies and conditions are actually much more impactful on participation.” Dr. Ritchie is quoted, "We found that these positive perceptions towards school lunch also increased reports of consumption of fruits and vegetables among students very modestly.” Neelon added, “Increasing participation and consumption of school meals can potentially address the shortfall in adolescent's intake of fruits and vegetables. Additionally, the closure of schools due to COVID-19 has elevated the importance of school meals to meet the nutritional needs of food-insecure families.” The study was funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) through a grant from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI). Read the full article online.