Elevating the Impact of Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation

Increasingly, public policy is recognized as a high-impact and robust approach for accelerating progress toward reducing and managing nutrition-related chronic diseases such as obesity (1). In various jurisdictions, policy makers enact courses of action, regulatory measures, laws, and policies and set funding priorities designed to improve access to healthier food and beverage options (2). Public policy, however, is often the least understood strategy for creating supportive nutrition environments for population health impact. Research has predominantly focused on understanding individual behavior change rather than evaluating approaches to environmental, policy, and system-level change (1,3,4). More attention has been given recently to approaches that could potentially strengthen our understanding of policy including empirical public health law and policy; research, dissemination, and implementation of science; and public health policy evaluation and research (5). Nevertheless, little is known about whether or how nutrition and obesity policy research and evaluation findings influence policy pathways or whether these findings are consistently and systematically used in formulating public policy.