The focus of the workshopis to learn about, discuss and apply recently developed methods for measuring and analyzing how agriculture and food systems affect nutrition and health

The workshop will address the topic in three parts: focusing first on access to food, then diet quality for health, and then combining the evidence to inform policy responses. This sequence is detailed below:1. New evidence on food security and access to healthy dietsthe workshop will begin with new methods used to measure whether a population has access to sufficient foods for an active and healthy life, using recently developed datasets on retail prices matched to food composition and nutritional requirements, combined with optimization tools to identify the lowest-cost healthy diets available at each time and place, and their affordability relative to income available for food. These data on the cost and affordability of healthy diets provide a diagnostic benchmark against which to compare actual dietary patterns, introduced in 2020 and was quickly adopted internationally to guide policies and programs. Tracking the affordability of least-cost diets allows policy analysts to distinguish whether poor diet quality and malnutrition was due to one of three possible causes: (a) high cost or unavailability of healthy diet where people live, (b) insufficient incomes available for food to afford even those least-cost healthy items, or (c) displacement of those least cost healthy items by other foods for reasons such as taste and aspirations, or time use and meal preparation costs. 2. New evidence on drivers of diet quality, nutritional status and obesitythe second sub-topic is analysis and measurement of nutritional quality for individual foods and overall diets, to identify the attributes of food that are most closely associated with unintended weight gain and obesity as well as diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease and other diet-related conditions. This work builds on advances in nutritional epidemiology that identify changes in dietary patterns, and provide nutrient profile scores for individual items to measure their contribution to overall health.those metrics of nutritional value and food quality then provide actionable guidance for private enterprises and public policy, for example towards implementation of policies developed as part of the 2022 white house conference on hunger, nutrition, and health, leading to a wide range of economic analyses of how those interventions affect nutritional outcomes.3. Obstacles and opportunities for policy response to improve diet quality in the U.S. And globallythe concluding section of each workshop is for operational questions regarding the cost-effectiveness as well as political, legal and administrative aspects of whether and how government interventions can use newly available data in efforts to improve diet quality for public health. Our aim in this part of the workshop is to spark dialogue among policy analysts across U.S. Age, ncies, international organizations and universities, including researchers who have not yet worked directly with the new data and techniques discussed in the first part of our workshop. This discussion is also intended to be useful for analysts and instructors of new and existing courses for advanced undergraduates and graduate students using recently-developed materials