Americans are just about failing when it comes to nutrition, says a food-as-medicine researcher. A few simple diet tweaks could help. [Video]

Americans are eating healthier than in previous years, but they still have a long way to go, according to a researcher who studies food as medicine.

Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University in Boston, co-authored a study on the quality of nearly 52,000 American adults’ diets between 1999 and 2020. The results were published online Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Mozaffarian and his co-author, Junxiu Liu, examined data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and found that the American diet has remained nearly the same over the past two decades.

Between 1999 and 2020, 10.5% of study participants transitioned from “poor” diets to healthier diets with more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and less sodium, processed meat, and saturated fat.

But only 1% of study participants ate an “ideal” diet — 4 to 5 cups of fruits and vegetables daily, …