March is National Nutrition Month. ECHO investigators are conducting important research on how nutrition influences child health across all five ECHO Program health outcome areas. This month’s edition of the Connector highlights recent ECHO research in this area.

The Research Spotlight features ECHO research that suggests that children’s body mass index (BMI) has decreased following implementation of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, possibly due to increased diet quality. ECHO’s large sample size, diversity, and ability to follow kids over long periods of time means that our researchers can leverage “natural experiments”—like policy changes or the COVID-19 pandemic—to examine how they affect children.

As a reminder, ECHO, assisted by NIH partners, will host a Virtual Return of Individual Research Results Workshop March 16-17, 2023. I invite you to join us for this two-day event aimed at identifying best practices for large-sample studies of pregnancy and childhood to ethically and feasibly return individual research results to participants. More information on workshop topics and registration information is available here.