The food we eat has a powerful impact on risk factors and severity of the most prevalent and costly chronic diseases, including obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and cerebrovascular disease. While breakthrough pharmaceuticals such as statins, ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, and glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists have revolutionized chronic disease care, nutrition plays an important role in the effective prevention, management, and treatment of hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases. Community-based interventions, addressing health behaviors and food environments, are promising strategies to improve community health and reduce health inequities. This forum will examine the burden of diet-related chronic diseases and the state of the science on the effectiveness of community-based interventions to improve nutrition and reduce the risk of chronic disease. It will explore the value health economic evaluations of nutrition in health care and the challenges and opportunities in these evaluations in the special case of nutrition interventions. Speakers will highlight the need for economic evaluations of food and nutrition security-related interventions and why incorporating health equity and social determinants of health considerations into these evaluations is important.

Elizabeth Lynch will discuss the state of the science on community-based nutrition interventions for individuals with hypertension and strategies for community-partnered research aimed at improving nutrition and reducing chronic disease. Mark Nuijten will examine the results of the experience of applying health economics evaluation for nutrition interventions in malnutrition, including malnutrition related to obesity and to oncology. Jason Shafrin will discuss the opportunities and challenges of economic evaluation of nutrition interventions and compare economic analysis of nutrition interventions with analysis of pharmaceutical interventions.