NCC News Bite – December 2024

Uncategorized

 

This edition contains the following articles:

 

NCC Food and Nutrient Database being used for the Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program

 

We know that a number of our clients are working on the NIH funded Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) program, a groundbreaking project that will develop algorithms that predict individual responses to food and dietary patterns.  The NCC Food and Nutrient database is being licensed for use in the NPH program, particularly for planning the menus for the controlled diets and for providing additional nutrients to the dietary recall data being collected using the Automated Self-Administered 24 recall (ASA24) dietary assessment tool.  We’re proud to be providing food composition data to support this important research program.

 

Did you know? List of foods unique to various eating traditions

 

NCC is committed to making NDSR a tool that supports equity and inclusion in nutrition research.  As resources have allowed, we have steadily worked to expand foods unique to various eating traditions included in our database.  Recently, we worked to add more foods unique to the eating traditions of Nigeria, Jamaica, Somalia, Haiti, and Hawaii.  Are you wondering if our database includes foods eaten by members of your study population? We have updated our list of foods unique to various eating traditions on our website, which you can view here.

 

Are there foods unique to the eating traditions of your study participants that you’d like to see added to NDSR? If so, please email us at NDSRhelp@umn.edu, and we will add them to our list of food requests.  You don’t need to wait for a client survey to let us know.  If you have funding for a special project and would like to partner with us to add a large number of foods unique to a certain eating tradition to our database, let us know!

 

NDSR licensing and annual support costs

 

We know many of you are pressed financially due to limited NIH grant support. Some have asked if we could lower our prices in consideration of the lean times researchers are facing, and some have asked us to give discounts for certain projects. We wish we could, but we aren’t able to lower pricing at this time or for the foreseeable future, and out of fairness to all our clients we do not provide discounts. 

 

NCC began 50 years ago with NIH funding, and some funding was continued to partially support maintenance and enhancement of NDSR. In 2014 that NIH funding was discontinued. Since then, we have relied exclusively on NDSR licensing and annual support, database licensing, and grants to support our work. We are proud of the work we are able to do with a small team, and we look forward to continuing to support nutrition research in the years to come. In order to ensure that we can do this, we must charge for use of NDSR and the NCC Food and Nutrient Database.   

 

We hope this information is useful to you in understanding NDSR licensing and annual support costs.

 

NDSR Training

 

The next NDSR Training Workshops are scheduled for January 13th and 14th, 2025 and mid-February, 2025 (exact dates TBD). Trainings are held via Zoom from 9am-5pm CT both days. Register here by January 1st if you are interested in the January training. The registration cutoff for the February training will be determined once the dates have been finalized. Space in the training workshops is limited and registration may close early if all seats fill before the cutoff date.

 

 

End-of-Year Holidays

 

NCC will be closed on December 24, 25, 26, and January 1st due to the University of Minnesota holidays.  Please plan accordingly and check to see that you have access to any copies of NDSR you may want to use during that time.  User Support services will not be available on those closure days to provide passwords or other troubleshooting support.