Food Environment and Cardiometabolic Health

Cardiometabolic diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, remain leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Growing evidence suggests that the food environment plays a critical role in shaping dietary behaviors and long-term metabolic health. Factors such as access to healthy foods, marketing and pricing practices, neighborhood socioeconomic conditions, and exposure to ultra-processed foods can influence individual eating patterns across the lifespan. At the same time, digital food environments, food delivery platforms, and shifting consumer habits have created new layers of exposure that are only beginning to be understood. A deeper scientific understanding of how physical, social, commercial, and digital food environments interact to affect cardiometabolic health is urgently needed to guide prevention and policy.While most research on cardiometabolic disease has focused on individual-level risk factors, growing disparities suggest that upstream drivers—particularly the food environment—require greater attention. Communities with limited access to affordable, nutritious foods often experience higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and these patterns frequently overlap with structural inequities, including socioeconomic deprivation and racial/ethnic segregation. Yet questions remain: Which components of the food environment are most harmful or protective? How do food environments interact with built and social environments? How do marketing and digital food platforms influence dietary behavior and metabolic risk?This Research Topic seeks to assemble evidence that advances mechanistic understanding, strengthens causal inference, and supports scalable solutions. We encourage submissions that integrate nutrition science, epidemiology, geospatial analysis, behavioral science, policy research, clinical outcomes, and machine learning. Ultimately, this collection aims to inform strategies—from clinical interventions to community design and policy reform—that promote healthy dietary patterns and reduce cardiometabolic disease burden at the population level.We invite research that examines how physical, social, commercial, and digital food environments determine diet quality and cardiometabolic outcomes. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Food access and affordability.• Ultra-processed food environments.• Digital and marketing influences.• Neighborhood deprivation.• Food deserts and food swamps.• School and workplace nutrition environments. • Structural inequities and health disparities.• Policy or behavioral interventions targeting the food environment.We welcome a wide range of manuscript types, including original research, systematic and scoping reviews, brief reports, methods papers, community-based research, and translational or policy-focused studies. Multidisciplinary and international contributions are strongly encouraged. Topic editors: Weichuan Dong, Pedro Rafael Vieira De Oliveira Salerno Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/76521/food-environment-and-cardiometabolic-health