When Yuru Huang, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, talks about nutrition policy, she doesn’t start with statistics or regulatory language. She starts with the grocery store.
Picture a busy shopper, she says, reaching for familiar items — chips, cereal, snacks — moving quickly, almost automatically. The nutrition facts panel is there, technically, but it’s small, numeric, and tucked on the back of the package. For millions of Americans trying to eat healthier, that information is easy to overlook and not always easy to understand.
That everyday moment is at the heart of Dr. Huang’s research, and at the center of a growing national conversation about how food policy can improve public health.
Research Rooted in Real-World Experiences
Dr. Huang studies how food and nutrition policies shape the choices people make. Since joining UT Health Sciences in September 2025, she has brought with her a rare blend of academic training and hands-on policy experience that puts her work directly on the pulse of current debates.
Her latest study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and selected for special media coverage by the journal, examines one of the most consequential nutrition policy proposals in decades: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s proposed front-of-package nutrition label.
Unhealthy diet, Dr. Huang notes, is responsible for one in five deaths in the United States. At the same time, surveys show Americans overwhelmingly want to eat healthier, yet more than half say they struggle to understand which foods are actually good for them.
“That gap between intention and action is where policy can help,” Dr. Huang said.
The FDA’s proposed “Nutrition Info Box,” introduced in January 2025, would place an interpretive label on the front of most packaged foods, signaling whether levels of saturated fat, sodium, and added sugar are low, medium, or high. It’s an effort to make nutrition information more accessible, especially when shoppers are deciding what to buy.
Dr. Huang and her colleagues — including senior author Anna Grummon, PhD, at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Jason Block, MD, at Harvard Medical School, principal investigator of the grant funding this study — wanted to know: Does it work equally well for everyone?
To find out, the research team conducted a large online randomized controlled trial with more than 5,000 U.S. adults. Participants were shown pairs of food products with different front-of-package labels and asked to identify which option was healthier. The study tested six labeling designs, including the Nutrition Info box (FDA proposal), “high-in” warning labels, and spectrum-style labels used in countries like Australia and New Zealand.
A Key Finding
The results largely confirmed the FDA’s internal research: front-of-package labels significantly improved consumers’ ability to identify healthier foods, and the FDA’s proposed Nutrition Info labels performed best overall.
But the research team uncovered a critical nuance, one with real policy implications.
“The improvement in understanding for the FDA’s proposed Nutrition Info labels was driven mostly by people with higher nutrition literacy,” Huang said. “For consumers with lower nutrition literacy, the benefit was much smaller.”
Nutrition literacy, she explained, refers to how well people can interpret and use nutrition labels. It captures a specific set of skills or cognitive abilities needed to understand and use nutrition information. The very populations policymakers hope to support (i.e., those with lower nutrition literacy) may not benefit equally from the proposed design.
“That’s not an argument against labeling,” Dr. Huang emphasized. “It’s an argument for getting the design, and the education around it, right.”
How People Actually Shop
In a second, related study, researchers examined whether better understanding actually translated into healthier purchasing decisions. Surprisingly, the label that best improved understanding did not lead to healthier choices in a simulated grocery-shopping environment.
The reason, Dr. Huang believes, lies in how people make decisions.
“When you’re shopping, a lot of choices are habitual and fast,” she said. “But when we ask people directly which food is healthier, they slow down and think differently.”
That insight led to another important finding: a spectrum-style label, which ranked foods from least to most healthy, created smaller gaps between high- and low-nutrition-literacy groups and was the only label that led to healthier choices in the shopping simulation.
For policymakers, Dr. Huang says, the message is clear. Label design matters.
Looking ahead, she’s collaborating with Dr. Grummon from Stanford University to explore how nutrition labeling could extend beyond grocery store shelves and into digital spaces, particularly social media platforms where teenagers and young adults are exposed to constant food marketing.
“We’re thinking about ultra-processed food labels that could work in social media settings,” Dr. Huang said. “That’s where people are spending their time now, and it’s a space where policy hasn’t caught up yet.”
Science That Moves Beyond the Page
“Dr. Huang’s work exemplifies research with tangible real-world impact,” said Michael Hocker, MD, executive dean of UT Health Sciences’ College of Medicine. “She generates evidence that can influence national policies and help families make healthier choices in daily life.”
For Dr. Huang, this focus on public impact is deeply personal. Before entering academia, she spent nearly four years at the FDA working on nutrition policy initiatives, including sodium reduction. She also trained at the Johns Hopkins University, University of Cambridge, and the University of California, Davis, collaborating closely with policymakers and learning that good science only matters if it reaches the public.
That’s what motivates me. If policy can shift the population risks just a little bit, the impact is enormous.
Dr. Yuru Huang
“At Cambridge, we believed research communication was just as important as the research itself,” she said. “Science doesn’t end with publication.”
At UT Health Sciences, Dr. Huang sees an environment where that philosophy thrives, where researchers are asking questions that matter not just in journals, but in real lives and real policy decisions.
Even small changes, she notes, can have outsized effects. A modest reduction in average sodium intake — just 200 milligrams per day — could significantly reduce rates of hypertension and cardiovascular disease nationwide.
“That’s what motivates me,” Dr. Huang said. “If policy can shift the population risks just a little bit, the impact is enormous.”
“Dr. Huang’s work highlights how rigorous population health research can inform national policy in ways that are both practical and equitable,” said Jessica Snowden, MD, vice chancellor for Research at UT Health Sciences. “At UT Health Science Center, we are committed to science that moves beyond the page and into our daily lives, making it easier for families like yours and mine to navigate our shopping centers and our kitchens.”
As federal agencies finalize nutrition regulations and lawmakers debate how to make America healthier, Dr. Huang’s work underscores a larger truth: the future of public health may hinge not on telling individuals to make better choices, but on building systems and policies that make healthy choices easier for everyone.
And at UT Health Sciences, that future is already taking shape.