Food environments and human health

This month, Nature Food presents a Focus issue on the recent evolution of food environments, their influence on individual food choices and efforts to reduce their impact on public health.

Reduced access to healthy diets, combined with the pervasiveness of ultra-processed foods, pose severe consequences for public health and the environment. Francesco Branca, former director of the World Health Organization’s Department of Nutrition and Food Safety and invited professor of public health at the University of Geneva, reflects on our current food environment and the need to steer it towards people’s nutritional needs rather than market interests.

The food industry has created ultra-processed food-like products that disrupt nature’s biological matrix and exploit our innate preferences for sugar, salt and fat — with the goal of encouraging overconsumption and maximizing profit. Increases in obesity, other nutrition-related non-communicable diseases and environmental harms have occurred as a result. Only major political commitments and the adoption of healthy food policies will curb ultra-processed food’s negative impact on global planetary and human health.

Federal policy action to improve the healthiness of food environments in the United States has been limited. This Perspective calls for the involvement of researchers and advocates in food policymaking at the state and local levels and shows how this can be achieved at each stage of the policy process.

‘Food is Medicine’ has been increasingly accepted in the US healthcare system. Developing and implementing such programmes globally could advance mental health, improve providers’ experiences and stimulate positive change in the food and agricultural sectors.

Front-of-pack nutrition labelling is increasingly adopted as a tool to promote healthier diets. This paper reviews major front-of-pack labelling schemes in the EU with a focus on Nutri-Score, offering a critical assessment of the policy process led by the European Commission on the topic and underscoring the need for it to be more transparent and evidence-based.

Global food systems are dominated by large corporations that are primarily driven by the goal of maximizing profits and shareholder value. Strengthening corporate accountability to promote health, equity and environmental sustainability is a critical part of recalibrating current corporatized food systems.

The emergence of ultra-processed foods is closely connected to the commercialization of food systems. Limiting their unrestrained growth may be critical to improving human and planetary health.

Information on the degree of processing of food items is key for better consumer choices. GroceryDB is a dataset with more than 50,000 food items sold at major grocery stores in the United States that uses big data to provide information on processing—categorized by store, food category and price range.

Understanding the impact of retail food environments on human health is key to food systems transformation. This study examines global trends in retail food environments over the past two decades, showing that changes in these environments are associated with the prevalence of obesity.

Policies on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) can help drive food system transformation, but the extent to which the current policy and regulatory landscape contributes to this transformation remains unclear. Based on three different food policy, public health and regulatory frameworks, this study identifies UPF-related regulatory interventions implemented by national governments worldwide and analyses their scope and strength.