Policy themes and instruments in WHO and UNICEF child food-environment guidance, 2015-2025: a computational content analysis

In children's food environments, global guidance can shape policy discourse and instrument choice, but its content does not establish implementation or outcomes. In 2015-2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) published English-language guidance at the global level. A documented search, 2-author screening, and author-decision-masked expert review produced a corpus of 22 expert-refrozen documents (1,099 pages; 1,259 primary chunks). The BERTopic with document-capped discovery yielded six provisional clusters: food-marketing restrictions and children's rights; obesity burden; nutrition-sensitive social protection and service delivery; school, physical activity, and healthy food environments; infant and young child food promotion controls; and business engagement and food-industry governance. Among 978 chunks, marketing restrictions and children's rights accounted for 332 assigned chunks (33.9%). The expert accepted all descriptors and changed three of seven boundary decisions; applying those decisions and rerunning the full pipeline retained six identity-mapped clusters. Fixed-corpus seed and zoning diagnostics were favorable, but context expansion produced seven clusters and dominant-source removal substantially reorganized two source-concentrated clusters. To assess coding reliability, an 84-chunk exercise was archived under the earlier 19-document freeze; issuer and period profiles were descriptive. The study therefore provides a bound, auditable map rather than a stable taxonomy. Nutritional health literacy is a downstream interpretive application: no actual implementation process or literacy, behavioral, dietary-quality, or health outcome was measured.