Policies, Prices, and Places: Quantifying Diet, UPF, and Cardiometabolic Impacts in Nutritional Epidemiology

Understanding how people eat and their determinants requires looking beyond individual choices. Nutrition researchers increasingly recognize that policies, prices, and the environments in which people live shape dietary patterns in powerful ways. From the affordability of fresh foods to the marketing and availability of ultra-processed products, structural factors can quietly steer populations toward healthier or more harmful habits. At the same time, rising rates of cardiometabolic conditions highlight the need for stronger evidence connecting these upstream influences to concrete health outcomes. This Research Topic brings together emerging work that quantifies these links, offering new insights into how economic and policy levers interact with behaviour, food systems, and cardiometabolic risk. It aims to support more effective, equitable approaches to improving diet quality at scale.The goal is to bring bring evidence to how structural determinants shape what people eat and the health consequences that follow. Although nutrition science has long focused on individual behaviour, there is growing recognition that policy frameworks, food pricing, and the built environment profoundly influence dietary choices and exposure to ultra-processed foods. By highlighting quantitative and qualitative approaches that capture these wider forces, this edition aims to deepen understanding of the mechanisms linking food systems to cardiometabolic outcomes. We seek to showcase research that not only measures these relationships but also points toward actionable pathways for change—whether through fiscal strategies, regulatory tools, or interventions that reshape local food landscapes. Ultimately, the edition aims to support policymakers, researchers, and practitioners in designing more effective, equitable solutions that improve diet quality and reduce the burden of chronic disease at the population level.This Research Topic focuses on quantitative and qualitative approaches that examine how policies, food prices, commercial environments, and place-based factors shape dietary patterns, ultra-processed food consumption, and cardiometabolic outcomes. We welcome contributions that investigate economic levers, regulatory actions, retail food environments, geographic inequalities, facilitators and barriers, and the interaction between food systems and population health. Studies that advance methods for measuring structural drivers of diet, such as natural experiments, longitudinal analyses, system-level modelling, or spatial epidemiology, are particularly encouraged. Manuscripts may include original research articles, brief reports, systematic or scoping reviews, methodological papers, and policy evaluations. Interdisciplinary work bridging nutrition, epidemiology, health economics, public policy, or data science is especially suitable. Submissions should clearly outline their analytical approach and highlight implications for improving dietary quality and reducing cardiometabolic risk at scale. Topic editors: Zoé Colombet, Martin O'Flaherty, Irazu Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/76401/policies-prices-and-places-quantifying-diet-upf-and-cardiometabolic-impacts-in-nutritional-epidemiology