ArticleThe American journal of clinical nutrition2025
School-based nutrition education programs alone are not cost effective for preventing childhood obesity: a microsimulation study.
Article in The American journal of clinical nutrition, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Healthy Eating and Food Hygiene Among Adolescents in Central Kazakhstan: A Cross-Sectional Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Article
- Availability and Implementation Characteristics of Nutrition Health Promotion Interventions in Quebec Elementary Schools.The Journal of school health · 2025Article
- Optimal nutrition for all requires a synergistic approach between food environments and food systems.Nature food · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAlthough interventions to change nutrition policies, systems, and environments (PSE) for children are generally cost effective for preventing childhood obesity, existing evidence suggests that nutrition education curricula, without accompanying PSE changes, are more commonly implemented.
objectivesThis study aimed to estimate the societal costs and potential for cost-effectiveness of 3 nutrition education curricula frequently implemented in United States public schools for childhood obesity prevention.
methodsIn 2021, we searched for nutrition education curricula in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)-Ed Toolkit, a catalog of interventions for obesity prevention coordinated by the federal government. Standard costing methodologies estimated the societal costs from 2023 to 2032 of nationwide implementation of each identified curriculum. Using the Childhood Obesity Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Study (CHOICES) microsimulation model, which projects the costs, health care costs saved, and cases of obesity prevented for childhood obesity prevention interventions, we conducted threshold analyses for each curriculum, estimating the cost per quality-adjusted life-year for a range of hypothetical effects on child BMI to determine how large of an effect each curriculum would need to have to meet a cost-effectiveness threshold of $150,000 per quality-adjusted life-year.
resultsThree nutrition education curricula without PSE were identified from SNAP-Ed; none had evidence of an impact on obesity risk. From 2023 to 2032, the estimated implementation costs of the curricula nationwide ranged from $1.80 billion (95% upper interval: $1.79, $1.82 billion) to $3.48 billion (95% upper interval: $3.44, $3.51 billion). Each curriculum would have to reduce average child BMI by 0.10 kg/m
conclusionsSNAP-Ed-endorsed nutrition education curricula alone are unlikely to be cost effective for preventing childhood obesity. Continued efforts to implement interventions with strong evidence for effectiveness, including PSE approaches, are needed.
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Registered trials
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