Researchers developed a culturally-grounded intervention to promote healthy beverage consumption among Navajo children aged 2–5 years. This study, which took place from 2021–2023, evaluated prepost changes in beverage habits and caregiver knowledge and attitudes. This was a prospective cohort study with prepost evaluation. Children attending participating early child education sites and their primary caregivers were More

In March 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic triggered lockdowns in several states, which immediately affected the number of children served by the CACFP. Nationally, there was a 23% reduction in the number of meals served through CACFP in 2020 compared with 2019. From July 2021 through June 2023, a series of USDA waivers More

Family childcare home (FCCH) providers’ participation in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) has declined, often due to inadequate tiered reimbursements. During COVID-19, federal waivers temporarily removed tiers and raised reimbursement rates, offering insight into program impacts. From September 2023 to February 2024, interviews with California FCCH providers (n=31), CACFP sponsors (n=10), and More

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest U.S. poverty alleviation program, with positive effects on health equity. Over 20% of eligible households do not receive benefits. In this qualitative study, researchers explored benefits of and barriers to EITC receipt among EITC-eligible families through analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews with EITC-eligible parents in California More

WIC serves more than 50% of all infants born in the U.S. The goal of this study is to build a forecasting model to estimate national WIC funding needs under various policy and economic conditions through fiscal year 2027. The model will also be designed to allow for updates to forecast funding needs for future More

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) commitment to child obesity ends in December 2025, marking the conclusion of a two-decade investment in Healthy Eating Research (HER). As part of our RWJF legacy, HER is developing a national research agenda for policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) interventions and strategies to promote food and nutrition security, optimal More

Nutritional exposures during pregnancy and the first two years of a child’s life influence growth and risk for obesity. Upstream interventions that involve policy, systems, and/or environmental approaches may support equitable nutrition and healthy growth early in life. Yet little is known about application of these interventions in clinical settings. This scoping review characterized the More

This study investigated whether demographic, social, and economic determinants of health, including length of time participating in safety net programs, are associated with diet quality and weight status in early childhood. Using the WIC infant and toddler feeding practices study-2, classification and regression tree identified the sequence of binary splits that best differentiated the sample More

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the state Earned Income Tax Credit on food insecurity among economically at-risk U.S. households with children and explore differential effects across sociodemographic groups. The authors used an intent-to-treat causal inference design and household-level data from all 50 U.S. states available from the Current Population More

This study aimed to assess whether state minimum wage generosity was associated with change in food insecurity among households with children and explore differential policy impacts across sociodemographic groups. This cross-sectional study of a national sample of US households from the Current Population Survey used a 2-way fixed effects modeling approach to test whether increases More