Hello and

today I'm going to the Nutrition Devo Podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagle and today I'm going to be talking to Dr. Taylor Wallace

about his plan for improving nutrition research and policy.

Taylor is an adjunct professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at George

Mason University and also CEO at the

George Mason University and also CEO at the Think Healthy Group Inc.

and his research and his work focuses on how we can use diet

as a tool to prevent chronic disease.

Welcome to the podcast, Taylor.

Thanks so much for having me.

Well, I'm so glad you had time to talk with us because you recently published an opinion piece in USA Today

calling for the establishment of a national institute of nutrition.

And you argue that nutrition research is grossly underfunded by the federal government and that this has a cascade of negative

effect.

Right, you know, we've been having debates back and forth of whether taxpayer dollars should

be used to develop new drugs and new treatments that are,

you know, kind of handed off to pharmaceutical industries.

But really, the big issue is we're putting all this money into treatment and not investing at all

in prevention and you know somewhere around three to five percent of the entire NIH budget is actually allocated to nutrition and prevention research.

That's a really tiny percentage.

Yeah, it's actually quite egregious when you look at the large picture, you know, you see about two-thirds of adults are either overweight or obese.

And really people think things like obesity are just really simple if I you know don't

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