Nutrition-transition and intervention themes in publications explicitly focused on childhood obesity: a systematic computational mapping review

Background Nutrition transition connects childhood obesity to changing diets, food environments, intervention institutions, and unequal research capacity. We systematically mapped how these issues were represented in indexed publication records. Methods Title-restricted childhood/adolescent obesity searches in the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus supplied 19,858 comparable filtered exports; 6,909 nutrition-explicit original-study records formed the primary corpus. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and SPECTER2-based BERTopic were aligned and used to compare 2016–2020 with 2021–2025. Sensitivities varied model, corpus, temporal unit, random seed, BERTopic parameters, and denominator. Author-affiliation countries were fractionally counted. Estimands captured record-level research attention and institutional participation. Results Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) yielded 35 topics, and BERTopic yielded 23 topics, with 27.34% of documents assigned to the HDBSCAN noise cluster before reassignment. In the retrieved corpus, diet quality, meal patterns, and food processing had a +0.97-percentage-point LDA contrast ( q < 0.001) and a +1.66-point raw-BERTopic contrast ( q = 0.077). Double burden, food insecurity, and structural determinants of nutrition had corresponding contrasts of +0.87 ( q < 0.001) and +1.13 points ( q = 0.061). Adjusted support remained model-specific, with no focal pair supported in both models; year-level tests also fell below adjusted thresholds. The family/community BERTopic estimate was corpus-specification dependent and inconclusive. Of 6,909 records, 6,877 had parsed affiliation countries; high-income fractional affiliation share was 59.27% in 2021–2025 and low-income share was 1.06%. Conclusion Descriptive findings consistently observed within this title-explicit English-language indexed corpus concerned its thematic structure and institutional geography. Temporal contrasts were corpus-conditional observational patterns whose support depended on model and temporal unit. They motivate a prospective study of how food-system pressures, implementation institutions, and regional institutional participation shape childhood-obesity dietary strategies.