Using natural experiments to evaluate public health interventions

Key messages

• Natural experiments are an increasingly valued approach for assessing the health impact of health and non-health interventions when planned and controlled experimental research designs may be infeasible or inappropriate to implement.

• We investigated how natural experiments have been used in obesity prevention to understand more about their value for informing evidence-based policies and practice.

• We found that natural experiments may be underutilised as an approach for providing evidence of the effects of interventions, particularly for evaluating health outcomes of interventions when unexpected opportunities to gather evidence arise.

• Greater recognition of the utility and versatility of natural experiments in generating evidence for complex health issues like obesity prevention is needed.