# The role of the contextual food environment and community programs and policies on diet and dietary disparities in the national Healthy Communities Study

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · 2024 · $123,733

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Unhealthy diets are associated with numerous deleterious health outcomes. Yet, most children do not
consume a healthy diet, in particular Black/African American and Hispanic children, and children of low
socio-economic status (SES). Previous studies have found that community characteristics influence
diet but the effectiveness of community programs and policies (CPPs) to influence diet is not consistent
across communities by racial/ethnic composition and community SES. The contextual food
environment is an important consideration in understanding the effectiveness of CPPs on diet and may
explain, in part, the differential effect of CPPs across subgroups. However, very few studies have
examined what interventions are most effective for improving diet within community settings and there
are even fewer national studies of how contextual factors influence food environment intervention
outcomes. The proposed study will leverage existing NHLBI datasets with information on CPPs,
contextual food environments, and child, household, neighborhood, school, and community
characteristics that can affect child diet. The study includes over 4,500 children in grades K – 8 from
diverse racial/ethnic and SES backgrounds in 130 communities in the United States. Nearly 10,000
CPPs were documented from over 1,400 key informant interviews within communities. Contextual food
environment measures (e.g., density of supermarkets) in 1, 3, 5, and 8 km buffers around the home,
and in a school-centric buffer, were derived from over 58 million business listings. The specific aims in
this study are to 1) determine the effect of CPPs and the contextual food environment on diet including
intake of energy-dense foods of minimal nutritional value; total added sugar intake; sugar intake from
SSBs; fruit and vegetable intake; whole grain consumption; and fast food consumption, and 2)
determine whether differences persist by race, ethnicity, and SES in the relationship between CPPs
and diet once contextual food environment data are considered. To assess our aims, a generalized
linear mixed model with random intercepts and slopes will be estimated controlling for clustering at the
community level. The proposed study is cost-effective in that it entails secondary data analyses using
linked data from two previous studies. The study is unique in its use of CPPs and contextual food
environment measures at multiple geographic scales in a large, diverse national sample of children
along with control variables at the child, household, neighborhood, school, and community levels. The
findings are expected to help shape how future community investments in programs, interventions, and
policies are tailored and implemented to improve children’s diets and to address diet-related health
disparities early in life.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10893600
- **Project number:** 5R21HL170240-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
- **Principal Investigator:** NATALIE COLABIANCHI
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $123,733
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-08-01 → 2025-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10893600

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10893600, The role of the contextual food environment and community programs and policies on diet and dietary disparities in the national Healthy Communities Study (5R21HL170240-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10893600. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*