USDA Launches Tool to Link Retail and Nutrition Data

The Economic Research Service (ERS) department of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is launching an app called 'Linkages', which connects retail scanner statistics to USDA nutrition databases, enabling researchers to better understand the cost of healthy eating in America.

The USDA compiles The Healthy Eating Index (HEI), a measure of diet quality that assesses conformance to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and is used to monitor the diet quality of the US population and the low-income part of it. Linkages will provide researchers with detailed information on areas such as the package size, brand, and flavor of certain items purchased by consumers. ERS says the tool could help guide policy makers when it comes to food labeling; which in turn, could lead to people making healthier choices.

ERS Senior Economist Andrea Carlson (pictured) says the tool will open doors for a whole new area of research, adding: 'Now we can use scanner data to look at the cost of health food purchases at the store. We can look at what people bought and why, and it will help us understand the costs of a healthy diet. We want to do anything we can do to better understand how to reduce obesity rates in this country'.

Web site: www.usda.gov .