§5313 Development of comprehensive plan for National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Program

Summary

Require the Secretaries, with advice from the Board, to create and run a national plan for tracking and researching American diets and nutrition. The plan must continuously collect and report data on people’s dietary and nutritional status and trends, including separate looks at groups like children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, elderly people, low-income groups, and racial and ethnic groups when the Secretaries choose. It must sample identifiable low-income groups, study food spending and use of food aid, and find times when benefits don’t cover a healthy diet. The plan must fund research to make common measures and methods, keep national data banks, help State and local agencies build monitoring systems, and coordinate nutrition work across federal agencies. At minimum, the plan must keep surveys like NHANES and NFCS, provide by 1991 for ongoing collection and faster analysis of nationally representative data (able to give reliable results for high-risk groups and places), include military and some institutional populations in surveys, finish older survey analyses collected before 1984 within the first plan year, improve methods and standards, set baseline data, give training and technical help to States, invite private and academic participation, list existing nutrition activities, set program goals and management, and set up regular reviews. The plan must assign duties to each federal agency, describe each agency’s tasks, and serve as the basis for agency funding requests for the program’s ten-year period. Within 12 months after October 22, 1990, the Secretaries must publish a proposed plan for public comment for at least sixty days, and within sixty days after that comment period ends submit the final plan to the President, Congress, and the Federal Register. The plan must not change any law that limits how appropriated funds are used or which agency gets the money.