Nutritional epidemiology focuses on understanding how dietary patterns, food choices, and the environment interact to affect population health. In recent years, attention has shifted toward the combined effects of diet quality, the extent of food processing, and pervasive exposure to environmental chemicals present across the modern food supply. Emerging research has shown that ultra-processed foods often contain higher concentrations of packaging-derived chemicals, such as phthalates and bisphenols, and that dietary habits, like the consumption of plant-forward or seafood-heavy diets, can present both nutritional benefits and contaminant risks. Large cohort and biomonitoring studies have started mapping these multidimensional exposures, but significant gaps persist in quantifying combined risks, unravelling causal pathways, and clarifying how food environments shape disparities in exposure and subsequent health outcomes.
This Research Topic aims to advance the epidemiological understanding of how diet quality and food processing relate to environmental chemical exposures, and how these joint exposures influence a spectrum of health endpoints, including cardiometabolic, cancer, reproductive, and developmental outcomes. It seeks to foster research addressing key questions such as: What are the associations between diet quality indices and internal chemical dose? How do different levels and types of food processing predict biomarker-determined exposure profiles? What are the risks of mixed chemical exposures and how do vulnerable groups, such as children, pregnant women, and food-insecure individuals, experience these risks? Studies investigating these relationships will help inform dietary guidance, food policies, and evidence-based risk communication.
This Research Topic is limited to human, population-based research examining the intersections of dietary intake, food processing, and environmental chemical exposures, particularly as they relate to health outcomes and public health policy. To gather further insights in these domains, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
o Associations between diet quality, dietary patterns, and chemical exposure biomarkers
o The impact of food processing and packaging on internal chemical exposures
o Dietary sources of agricultural residues, persistent organic pollutants, and contaminants
o Methodological advances in dietary assessment and exposure measurement
o Advanced analytic methods for assessing mixtures, mediation, and causal inference in diet-chemical-health pathways
o Health outcomes ranging from cardiometabolic risk to reproductive and neurodevelopmental impacts
o The social patterning of dietary chemical exposures and implications for equity, food environments, and policy translation
Article types and fees
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
- Brief Research Report
- Case Report
- Clinical Trial
- Conceptual Analysis
- Data Report
- Editorial
- FAIR² Data
- FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
- General Commentary
Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.
Keywords: Nutritional Epidemiology, Ultra-Processed Foods, Food Packaging Chemicals, Human Biomonitoring, Chemical Mixtures, Cumulative Risk Assessment, Diet Quality Indices, Dietary Patterns, Environmental Health Disparities, Food Environments
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
