# Goals in Nutrition Science 2025–2030

## TL;DR

This paper outlines future goals for nutrition science from 2025 to 2030, emphasizing integrated approaches to food systems, sustainability, and human health.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a new agenda for nutrition science that integrates complex systems thinking with sustainability and equity.

## Key findings

- Nutrition science should address interconnected challenges like food security, sustainability, and health together.
- Isolated interventions are insufficient; systems approaches are needed to handle feedback and tradeoffs.
- The agenda emphasizes balancing environmental stewardship with socio-economic stability in food systems.

## Abstract

Already in its third edition, the Goals in Nutrition Science platform covers a five-year timeframe per volume, thus spanning 15 years from 2015 to 2030 (1, 2). This period aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals, and, in practice, these 5-year updates do capture major shifts in the field. As the second quarter of the 21st century unfolds, it increasingly appears that much of the widely promoted food technology has not delivered or is not yet ready. Nutrition, food security, and sustainability are therefore best treated as inseparable challenges within complex, adaptive food systems, where progress depends on addressing biology, behavior, markets, policy, and environmental constraints together rather than through isolated, linear interventions. Nutrition science matters because it sits at the hinge between human biology and the real-world conditions that determine what people can access, afford, choose, and safely consume. As food systems become more interconnected and more exposed to climate, conflict, and market volatility, the field is shifting from mainly reductionist problem solving toward approaches that can handle feedback, tradeoffs, and equity in context. Pursuing the goals set out here is not only a scientific agenda, but a planetary health imperative: sustainable food systems must secure current and future nutrition while balancing environmental stewardship, health, and socio-economic stability across the pathway from production to consumption and waste. Overall, the agenda points toward a new chapter of nutrition science that integrates the right level of complexity by combining deep disciplinary insight with better integrated systems approaches, and by mobilizing coordinated action.

Johannes le Coutre, Field Chief Editor, Frontiers in Nutrition.