Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center, established in 1994 in Little Rock, is one of six centers in the National Human Nutrition Research Center Program funded through the Agricultural Research Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The other five centers include:
- Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland;
- Children’s Nutrition Research Center in Houston, Texas;
- Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks, North Dakota;
- Jean Mayer Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston, Massachusetts; and
- Western Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis, California.
For more than sixty years there has been an intramural human nutrition research program within the USDA. Several special congressional acts have guided the creation of what is the current program, including the acts of 1977 and 1985 which established the USDA as the lead agency of the government for human nutrition research and further legislated the establishment of a separate and distinct mission with the USDA for research into food and nutrition. Federal legislation states specifically that the emphasis should be on nutritional needs of normal, healthy individuals and not biomedical aspects of human nutrition concerned with diagnosis or treatment of disease. While these latter two points are generally considered to be within the mission of the National Institutes of Health, the prevention of disease through diet and nutrition is within the mission of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Centers Program. Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center is the newest Human Nutrition Research Center and only the second to focus on pediatric nutrition.
Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center is located on the campus of Arkansas Children's Hospital. Arkansas Children's Hospital is one of the ten largest children's hospitals in the United States and is funded, in part, by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the state's only medical school. Arkansas Children's Hospital houses the only private pediatric research institute in the state, Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute, a 100,000 square foot facility providing a research environment for faculty members and pediatricians housed on the Arkansas Children's Hospital campus. Arkansas Children's Hospital, Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute and Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center are staffed with physicians and researchers from UAMS and, collectively, they serve as the major teaching hospital facility for pediatric care in the state of Arkansas.
