Nutrition Policy Institute Director Dr. Lorrene Ritchie presents at the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, SNEB, 2024 international conference. This year's international conference, themed “Understanding Foodways: Learning, Growing, and Sustaining,” will highlight the reasons why we eat the foods we eat and the impacts of those choices on ourselves and our communities.The SNEB conference takes place at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and through a virtual livestream from July 29th through August 1st, 2024. Lorrene Ritchie participates in a session on August 1, 3:30-4:30 p.m. ET titled “Food Waste Reduction Efforts: The Intersection of Food Ways, Climate Change, and Human Health,” along with...
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children—commonly known as WIC—is celebrating 50 years of improving the health of participants, including those who are pregnant, new parents, infants, and children under five. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 provided the US Department of Agriculture with $390 million, available through FY 2024, to carry out outreach, innovation, and program modernization efforts to increase participation and redemption of benefits for both the WIC program and the WIC Farmers' Market Nutrition Program. The USDA contracted with Mathematica and their partners, including the Nutrition Policy...
Over 38,000 participants in the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly known as WIC, completed a satisfaction survey in summer of 2023. Conducted across 21 participating WIC state agencies in all US Department of Agriculture administrative regions, the survey showed high satisfaction with the WIC program and that participants feel respected, valued and included by WIC staff. The hybrid WIC services introduced during the pandemic were successful, with two-in-three using in-person services, over half using remote services and nearly all finding it is easy to schedule appointments. The top...
A recent research brief from the Nutrition Policy Institute illuminates the experiences of participants newly enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children—commonly known as WIC. The brief, based on the 2021 Multi-State WIC Participant Satisfaction Survey, shares experiences of 26,642 WIC participants surveyed across 12 WIC state agencies, focused on the impacts of temporary changes to the WIC food package during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the 7,831 participants that responded to...
The School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley was recently granted candidacy for accreditation by the Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics for their new Berkeley Public Health Dietetic Internship program. The program aims to create a new public health dietetic internship model that will prepare students to tackle adaptive changes from clinic to the community and from qualitative and quantitative to policy and food systems. The program is a two-year internship that currently accepts 10 interns annually during the fall who are admitted to the