Session: Advancing Implementation Science to Promote Nutrition Equity (Society for Prevention Research 27th Annual Meeting)

Diet is integrally related to chronic disease risk, and evidence is mounting that access to healthy foods remains a key barrier to reducing chronic disease trends and inequities. This 20 x 20 presentation highlights six studies that are guided by a multidimensional framework of nutrition equity that includes five dimensions of access: physical, social, economic, service delivery, and personal. The studies share a common focus on developing actionable knowledge to guide implementation science with the goal of promoting healthy food access in low-resource rural and urban settings. In addition, each study is based on a community-engaged approach that sought to integrate end-users into study design, interpretation, and application with the goal of promoting relevance and credibility to speed up the bridge between research and practice. The first two presentations set the scene, illuminating the complexity of place-based initiatives. The first presentation highlights the dynamics of built environments by examining changes in healthy food retail options over time in two neighborhoods defined as “food deserts” by the US Department of Agriculture. The subsequent presentation illuminates the sociality of place introducing participatory social network analysis methods to uncover the relationship between people and places and their impact on food shopping patterns among people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Papers 3-5 focus on strategies to leverage big data to inform implementation of policy, systems, and environmental interventions designed to improve healthy food access. The third presentation describes the development and application of a diagnostic tool for tailoring community nutrition interventions like farmers’ markets to local levels of community readiness and capacity.The fourth presentation describes opportunities to leverage supermarket point of sale receipt systems to implement healthy food incentive programs that address economic constraints influencing diet among people receiving SNAP benefits. The fifth presentation adds to the this by highlighting how a hunger relief non-profit is utilizing big data integration through the use of an App that seeks to link community volunteers with grocery stores to quickly transfer fruits, vegetables, and bread to food pantry sites to reduce waste while promoting food security. Finally, the session concludes with a presentation that builds on concepts throughout the session emphasizing opportunities to develop system dynamic approaches to promote nutrition equity. The final presentation illuminates results of a participatory system dynamic modeling study highlighting dynamically interdependent relationships that can be sequenced, integrated, and tailored to maximize nutrition equity in low-resource settings.