Dear Colleagues,

Healthy eating is a key health promotion and disease prevention strategy. Worldwide, malnutrition remains a leading risk factor for morbidity and mortality. Preliminary evidence reveals the potential of public policies (healthy food subsidy, soda or fat tax, sugar-sweetened beverage labels, chain restaurant menu labeling, school competitive food laws, to name a few) and modifications of the local food or built environment in nudging people towards a healthier diet. Those interventions are highly scalable, address a large population, and are often cost-effective relative to personalized, small-scale, intensive clinical trials. On the other hand, not all policies or food environments are born equal. Different policies and food environments affect people’s food purchasing and dietary patterns differently (including the direction and magnitude of the effects, their cost–benefit portfolio, and unintended consequences). Moreover, even the same policy and food environment may exert differential impacts on population subgroups, which either reduces or reinforces health disparities and social inequities. This Special Issue calls for studies that assess the impact of policy and food environment on food/beverage purchase and dietary behavior worldwide. Both policy and food environment are broadly defined, including but not limited to public policies at the national, state, or local levels; and both physical (e.g., built) and nonphysical (e.g., price) environments. Both original studies (e.g., empirical analyses, modeling studies) and review articles (e.g., systematic reviews and meta-analyses) will be considered. The overarching goal of this Special Issue is to create a critical mass that substantiates the scientific evidence on the role of policy and food environment in influencing people’s food purchase and consumption patterns, which may shed light on future population-level interventions that promote a healthy diet and reduce social inequity.

Dr. Ruopeng An
Guest Editor

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• policy
• environment
• food purchase
• food consumption
• diet