April 2026

NCCOR’s 2025 Annual Report Showcases How New Developments in Child Obesity Research Expand What is Possible

April 2026, NCCOR

NCCOR’s 2025 Annual Report, Horizons in Childhood Obesity Research, highlights how NCCOR is helping the field navigate emerging questions, bridge research and practice, and foster collaboration across disciplines and sectors. Childhood obesity research is entering a period of transformative change. Rapid scientific advances, together with growing recognition of the complex drivers of health, have created new opportunities—and new responsibilities—for the field. As childhood obesity research evolves, NCCOR remains committed to advancing evidence that supports healthier children, families, and communities—now and in the years ahead.

Featured projects include:

• Implementation Scorecard: A decision-making companion for practitioners
  NCCOR’s newest tool, the Implementation Scorecard, was developed in response to challenges faced by practitioners implementing childhood nutrition, physical activity, and obesity prevention interventions. The scorecard guides users through four phases of implementation— Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, and Sustainment— helping them identify strengths, anticipate challenges, and make informed decisions.

• Physical Activity Research Opportunities (PARO) Framework
  NCCOR’s new PARO framework, detailed in the December 2025 article, “Development of the Physical Activity Research Opportunities (PARO) Framework” and published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, offers a strategic roadmap for researchers, funders, practitioners, and policymakers to advance their work.

• Obesity-Related Policy, Systems, and Environmental Research in the U.S. (OPUS) Workshops 
  NCCOR elevated insights from the workshops in a commentary published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which issues a call to action for the next phase of obesity-related PSE research, including the importance of 1) leveraging broader and more innovative research methods and partnerships; 2) recognizing the amount of time needed to bring PSE research to fruition; 3) measuring proximal, distal, and partner-relevant drivers and outcomes; and 4) accelerating efforts to build capacity for obesity-related PSE research. Workshop takeaways were also distilled in a series of learning guides for faculty, students, and early-career researchers. Finally, the workshop catalyzed new investments from the National Cancer Institute to support whole-of-systems approaches to obesity for cancer prevention and control.

• Clinical Research Gaps in Pediatric Obesity Pharmacotherapy Workshop
  NCCOR convened the Clinical Research Gaps in Pediatric Obesity Pharmacotherapy workshop in November 2025. The objective was to understand current practice and identify gaps and priority research questions that, when answered, could guide clinicians in the prescription, maintenance, and discontinuation of obesity medications for children and adolescents, as well as in supporting their caregivers. Stay tuned for a white paper sharing insights from the workshop, to be released this summer.

In addition to project profiles, this year’s report highlights recent conferences, webinars, and presentations and contains a detailed list of NCCOR members, making it an excellent introduction to NCCOR for those new to childhood obesity research and a helpful catalog of recent achievements in the field. To view the annual report, visit the NCCOR website.

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NCCOR Toolbox: NCCOR’s Recent Webinar on the Importance of Recess is Available Online

April 2026, NCCOR

NCCOR’s latest Connect & Explore webinar, Supporting Recess in Schools: Evidence, Health Impact, and Action, highlighted how high‑quality recess can serve as a powerful, evidence‑based strategy to increase physical activity and support children’s overall development. Speakers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California Nutrition Policy Institute introduced Play, Policy, and Potential: A Toolkit to Support Advancing Recess in Schools Through State Laws, a resource designed to help policymakers, researchers, and practitioners strengthen recess through clear, developmentally supportive policies. The discussion underscored how consistent recess not only boosts physical activity, but also supports emotional regulation, social connection, and healthier school environments. The webinar recording is now available on the NCCOR website, along with the complete Connect & Explore archive.

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From Farm to FIM

March 2026, The Rockefeller Foundation

Nearly half of adults live with at least one diet-related condition, and one in seven Americans experienced food insecurity in 2024. At the same time, American agriculture is under increasing financial strain—especially the 90% of farms that are small and mid-sized. Variable farm income, changing climate patterns, farm labor shortages, fragile supply chains, and decades of consolidation have contributed to the disappearance of 28,000 farms annually in recent years.

FIM is emerging as a powerful healthcare intervention that can improve health while lowering healthcare costs. FIM programs, including medically tailored meals (MTM), medically tailored groceries (MTG), and produce prescriptions (PRx), improve disease management and reduce hospitalizations of patients with chronic diseases. At full scale, MTMs alone could save an estimated $23.7 billion in healthcare spending each year, while avoiding 2.6 million hospitalizations.

As FIM scales through public and private insurers and health systems, it creates new demand for healthy food. This presents states with a significant economic opportunity: a new market that can be designed to channel healthcare dollars into resilient local food systems, increase farm revenues, and expand state economic growth.

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The Medically Tailored Meal Sustainability Blueprint

March 2026, Food is Medicine Coalition

The purpose of the Sustainability Blueprint is to outline a pathway to sustainable access and quality standardization for FIM interventions, starting with the medically tailored meal intervention (MTM). Specifically, the Blueprint starts with the legal framework that federal and state agencies use to define quality for all Medicaid covered benefits and uses these legal concepts to articulate guardrails for program design that can better ensure program quality and sustainability over time. The idea is that if we start with this consistency in current innovation projects, we will be better able to incorporate the services into the requirements of healthcare in the future.

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Doubling Investment and Growing Impact: 10 Cents a Meal 2023–2024 Evaluation Results

March 4, 2026, Michigan State University

10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids and Farms (10 Cents a Meal) was a state-funded local food purchasing incentive grant program that reimbursed 50% of the cost of fresh or minimally processed Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables, and dry beans, used in meals and educational activities for children.

During the 2023-2024 program, 10 Cents a Meal had the greatest reach to date in its history: 269 grantees in 66 counties that reached an estimated total of 594,000 children, in addition to over 320 food suppliers, including farmers and food hubs.

As a matching reimbursement grant, the state’s investment into this program generates at least double the impact for Michigan farms and food vendors. This means that through $3 million in state-funded grant reimbursements during this program year, nearly $6 million in spending was reported by grantees on eligible Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables, and dry beans. According to the Local Food Impact Calculator, this spending yields over $10.2 million in estimated economic impact for the state.

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Children with Obesity are at Risk of Disease Despite Normal Test Results

March 23, 2026, EurekAlert!

Children living with obesity but showing no signs of metabolic complications still have a significantly increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and abnormal blood lipid levels later in life. A new study from Karolinska Institutet, published in JAMA Pediatrics, also shows that these children benefit greatly from obesity treatment.

“There has been a debate about whether children with normal blood and liver values and normal blood pressure might not need treatment for their obesity. Our study shows that this assumption is incorrect,” says Claude Marcus, professor at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology, Karolinska Institutet.

A clearly increased risk

The study included just over 7,200 children aged 7–17 who had begun obesity treatment in Sweden and were followed up until age 30. The researchers compared children with so-called metabolically healthy obesity (MHO), children with obesity and impaired cardio-metabolic risk markers (MUO), and peers from the general population.

By age 30, 9 percent of the children with MHO had developed type 2 diabetes, compared with 17 percent of those with MUO and 0.5 percent in the control group. Similar patterns were observed for high blood pressure (11 percent in the MHO group, 18 percent in the MUO group, and 4 percent in the control group) and abnormal blood lipids (5 and 13 percent, respectively, compared to 1 percent in the general population).

“Even children with obesity who show no signs of cardiometabolic impact have a clearly increased risk of future diseases. This means that normal blood pressure and the absence of abnormal blood test results are not sufficient protection against future morbidity,” says Emilia Hagman, associate professor at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology, Karolinska Institutet.

All children need treatment

All children in the study received support for healthier lifestyle habits, and the researchers also investigated whether the treatment response affected the risk of future illness in the different groups. A good treatment response during childhood was linked to a reduced risk of all the diseases studied. The effect was equally significant in both the MHO and MUO groups.

“Our results suggest that all children with obesity need treatment, even if they appear completely healthy upon examination,” says Claude Marcus.

The study is based on data from the national quality registry BORIS and several Swedish health data registries. The research was funded by, among others, the Center for Innovative Medicine, the Ollie and Elof Ericsson Foundation, and the Freemason Foundation for Children’s Welfare. Several of the researchers report compensation from companies unrelated to this work. See the scientific article for a complete list of conflicts of interest.

[Source]

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Childhood Obesity Makes It Harder to Climb the Economic Ladder, Study Finds

March 18, 2026, EurekAlert!

Childhood obesity may be quietly undermining one of the central promises of American life.

A study by a Rutgers researcher has found that children who are obese are far less likely to climb the economic ladder as adults, raising concerns that a rising health problem also could deny many young Americans the chance to achieve the American dream.

“Childhood obesity isn’t just a health crisis,” said Yanhong Jin, a professor with the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and a coauthor of the study. “It is an economic mobility crisis.”

The research, published in the Journal of Population Economics, examined how childhood obesity affects intergenerational mobility, which measures whether children grow up to earn more than their parents.

The study draws on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, often called Add Health, a nationwide project that has followed thousands of Americans from adolescence into adulthood for more than two decades. The study is composed of a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 adolescents who were in grades 7 through 12 during the 1994-1995 school year, and have been followed for six waves of data collection to date, with the most recent wave from 2022 to 2025. The dataset includes information about participants’ health, education, income and genetic markers linked to body weight.

Jin conducted the study with economists Maoyong Fan of Ball State University and Man Zhang of Renmin University in China.

Using the Add Health data allowed researchers to explore the question in a new way. The study includes genetic information that helped the team separate the effect of obesity itself from other factors such as family income or neighborhood conditions.

The results were striking. Adults who were obese as children ended up much lower on the national income ladder than those who had a normal weight as children. A child is considered obese if their Body Mass Index is at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex, based on standardized growth charts.

“If children are obese compared with normal weight children, assuming everything else is the same, their income ranking is about 20 percentile points lower relative to their parents,” Jin said.

The researchers then examined why that economic gap appears to emerge over time.

“The evidence points to lower educational attainment, persistent health problems and disadvantages within the labor market,” said Fan, a coauthor of the study. “These include higher reported job discrimination and adverse occupational sorting.”

For Jin, an agricultural and health economist, the topic carries personal meaning. As a first-generation immigrant from China, she said she has long been interested in the idea that each generation should have a chance to do better than the one before.

Her interest in intergenerational mobility deepened as she began thinking about the American dream and whether children today still have the same chances their parents had.

“We wanted to explore the link between childhood conditions and intergenerational mobility to see what we can do,” she said.

The researchers also found that people who were obese as children were less likely to live in neighborhoods with strong economic opportunities later in life. They were less likely to live in areas with higher average incomes and less likely to live in communities with low poverty rates.

Most previous research on economic mobility has focused on neighborhood conditions and family background. Jin said her team wanted to explore another factor that had received less attention.

Studies that focused on the long-term impacts of obesity were more likely to examine its relationship with social stigma and educational attainment.

“But few have considered its relationship to intergenerational mobility,” Jin said.

The effects weren’t the same for everyone. The study found that the economic penalty linked to childhood obesity was larger for girls than for boys. It also was stronger among children from low-income families and among those who grew up in the South and Midwest.

Jin said the findings highlight the importance of preventing obesity early in life. Many policies focus on treating obesity after it develops, but the research suggests that prevention in childhood before it develops could have long-term benefits for both health and economic opportunity.

“If you are obese in childhood, for whatever the reason, you have a penalty in your adult economic status,” Jin said.

For policymakers, the study offers a broader way to think about the issue, the researchers said. Childhood obesity has often been viewed mainly as a medical concern. The research suggests that, if left unaddressed, childhood obesity may also shape economic opportunity and social mobility for decades to come.

“Interventions that reduce childhood obesity can deliver benefits well beyond lowering medical spending,” said coauthor Zhang. “They can support higher educational attainment, improve job prospects and increase upward economic mobility for the next generation.”

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How to Integrate and Leverage Digital Health Modalities for Health Promotion in Early Childhood Education: Opportunities to Improve Intervention Access and Engagement

March 7, 2026, Translational Behavioral Medicine

Abstract

Early childhood education (ECE) settings are important for the development of children’s healthy eating and physical activity behaviors. Efforts to disseminate and implement health behavior promotion strategies in ECE settings have seldom optimized digital health, a missed opportunity highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this commentary, we discuss previous efforts to shift ECE-based health behavior programs to digital health modalities, notable opportunities for digital health in these settings, and a multilevel perspective to support future efforts. We propose future directions in digital health literacy, reaching various ECE settings, implementation science, and community partnerships to expand the use of digital interventions.

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Contribution of Meals and Snacks Provided through the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) on Young Children’s Total Dietary Intake

March 2, 2026, Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics

Background

Several federal food assistance programs support children’s nutrition. However, evidence is limited on how the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), specifically, contributes to children’s dietary intake.

Objective

The study objective was to understand how CACFP meals and snacks contribute to young children’s overall dietary intake on a given day.

Design

A within-person, observational study design was used.

Participants/setting

Participants were one- to six-year-old children (n=1004) attending CACFP-participating early care and education (ECE) programs participating in the 2017 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Study of Nutrition and Activity in Childcare Settings (SNACS).

Main outcome measures

Daily energy-adjusted food group/specific nutrient intakes were the primary outcome measures, standardized by kilocalories consumed.

Statistical analyses performed

Paired t-tests evaluated how a child’s energy-adjusted dietary intake at a CACFP-participating ECE program compared to elsewhere on the same day, and analyses were stratified by duration of attendance at an ECE program and household food security status.

Results

Children attending an ECE program for a full day consumed most of their fruit (54%, SE: 0.02), whole grains (67%, SE: 0.03), and dairy (61%, SE: 0.02) from CACFP meals and snacks. When children ate at full day ECE programs, they consumed significantly more energy-adjusted dairy (0.3 c-eq/1000kcals, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.40) and whole grains (0.1 oz-eq/1000kcals, 95% CI: 0.03, 0.25), and less vegetables (-0.1 c-eq/1000kcals, 95% CI: -0.21, -0.08), protein foods (-0.4 oz-eq/1000kcals, 95% CI: -0.60, -0.26), sodium (-211 mg/1000kcals, 95% CI: -283.1, -139.8), saturated fat (-2.1 g/1000kcals, 95% CI: -2.91, -1.28), and added sugars (-6.8 g/1000kcals, 95% CI: -10.15, -3.54) than when they were not at an ECE program. Patterns in energy-adjusted intake differences remained for those experiencing food security compared to food insecurity except for whole grains; children experiencing food security had a significantly higher consumption of whole grains at a full-day ECE program compared to elsewhere (0.2 oz-eq/1000 kcals, 95% CI: 0.05, 0.26) whereas there was no difference for children experiencing food insecurity.

Conclusions

CACFP meals and snacks support nutritious diets for young children by contributing to higher energy-adjusted intakes of dairy and whole grains, and lower energy-adjusted intakes of sodium, saturated fat, and added sugars compared to what children consume elsewhere. Future research should examine how CACFP can further support nutritious diets for children.

[Source]

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