Public Health Nutrition

Maasai diet

by Michael Elmore-Meegan

Producing Synergy in Collaborations: A Successful Hospital Innovation

by Hope Corbin

Co-authored with Lise Corwin and Maurice Mittelmark

Patient malnutrition in hospitals is common and impedes recovery. Part of the problem is that hospitals are organised... more Patient malnutrition in hospitals is common and impedes recovery. Part of the problem is that hospitals are organised around diagnosis and treatment, not for good nutrition. This paper describes a Norwegian hospital’s nutrition innovation that enhanced collaboration across and within the hospital hierarchy. The Bergen Model of Collaborative Functioning was the analysis framework for the study reported here. Success factors included having a clear mission, a sound implementation plan, leader commitment, trust and coordination, committed partners, clear structure, rules and roles, face-to-face communication, celebrating accomplishments underway, and utilising the surrounding context to give the innovation visibility and publicity.

Keywords: Collaboration, partnership, collaborative functioning, innovation, hospital, hierarchy, health promotion, malnutrition, health services.

Evidencias en nutrición infantil: Revisiones sistemáticas y Evaluación de Guías de práctica clínica

by Mario Delgado-Noguera

Tesis de doctorado en Salud Pública. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. 2011. Spanish.

Maternal and infant nutrition has been reported as one of the main factors influencing children's growth and... more Maternal and infant nutrition has been reported as one of the main factors influencing children's growth and development. Both developed and developing countries show changes in lifestyle that jeopardise nutrition. This situation is called nutrition transition and it is associated with increased morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular causes, type II diabetes and certain types of cancer. Consequently, there is a global need to prevent these chronic diseases since childhood by means of an appropriate nutrition. In addition, solid evidence-based research is now required to provide a sound basis for informed decisions of doctors and policymakers working on child nutrition area. In this perspective, the aim of this work is to review three maternal and child nutrition issues with evidence-based methodology

Tabacchi, G., Mammina, C., Paoli, A., Filingeri, D., Bianco, A., Palma, A. (2011) The relationship between physical activity/sedentary behaviours, preadolescent schoolchildren weight status and gender in an area of Southern Italy. Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. 51 (Suppl.1 to No. 3): 57.

by Davide Filingeri

Tabacchi, G., Filingeri, D., Bianco, A., Mammina, C., Palma, A. (2011) The effect of early and familial factors on the development of schoolchildren obesity. Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. 51 (Suppl.1 to No. 3): 6.

by Davide Filingeri

Filingeri, D., Bianco, A., Jemni, M., Mammina, C., Paoli, A., Palma, A., Tabacchi, G., (2011) A web-based surveillance system for nutritional and physical activity in adolescence - The ASSO Project. Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. 51 (Suppl.1 to No. 3): 57.

by Davide Filingeri

Lessons for public health campaigns from analysing commercial food marketing success factors: a case study

by Federico Jose Armando Perez-Cueto Eulert

Jessica Aschemann-Witzel1*, Federico JA Perez-Cueto2, Barbara Niedzwiedzka3, Wim Verbeke2 and Tino Bech-Larsen1
* Corresponding author: Jessica Aschemann-Witzel jeaw@asb.dk
Author Affiliations
1 MAPP-centre, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University, Haslegaardsvej 10, 8210 Aarhus, Denmark
2 Department of Agricultural Economics, Ghent University, Coupure links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium
3 Institute of Public Health, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Krakow, ul. Św. Anny 12, 31-008 Kraków, Poland

Background
Commercial food marketing has considerably shaped consumer food choice behaviour. Meanwhile, public... more Background
Commercial food marketing has considerably shaped consumer food choice behaviour. Meanwhile, public health campaigns for healthier eating have had limited impact to date. Social marketing suggests that successful commercial food marketing campaigns can provide useful lessons for public sector activities. The aim of the present study was to empirically identify food marketing success factors that, using the social marketing approach, could help improve public health campaigns to promote healthy eating.

Methods
In this case-study analysis, 27 recent and successful commercial food and beverage marketing cases were purposively sampled from different European countries. The cases involved different consumer target groups, product categories, company sizes and marketing techniques. The analysis focused on cases of relatively healthy food types, and nutrition and health-related aspects in the communication  related to the food. Visual as well as written material was gathered, complemented by semi-structured interviews with 12 food market trend experts and 19 representatives of food companies and advertising agencies. Success factors were identified by a group of experts who reached consensus through discussion structured by a card sorting method.

Results
Six clusters of success factors emerged from the analysis and were labelled as "data and knowledge", "emotions", "endorsement", "media", "community" and "why and how". Each cluster subsumes two or three success factors and is illustrated by examples. In total, 16 factors were identified. It is argued that the factors "nutritional evidence", "trend awareness", "vertical endorsement", "simple naturalness" and "common values" are of particular importance in the communication of health with regard to food.

Conclusions
The present study identified critical factors for the success of commercial food marketing campaigns related to the issue of nutrition and health, which are possibly transferable to the public health sector. Whether or not a particular factor contributes to future success depends on the specific context of use, the combination of factors and the environment. Consideration of the specific applicability of the success factors identified in this study during the design of marketing activities could benefit public sector food and health-related campaigns.

Consumer implications of the WCRF's permanent update on colorectal cancer

by Federico Jose Armando Perez-Cueto Eulert

Please cite this article as: Pérez-Cueto, F.J.A., & Verbeke, W., Consumer implications of the WCRF's permanent update on colorectal cancer,
Meat Science 2012; 90:977-978, doi:10.1016/j.meatsci.2011.11.032

The last update published by the World Cancer Research Fund on colorectal cancer shows that there is convincing... more The last update published by the World Cancer Research Fund on colorectal cancer shows that there is convincing evidence that physical activity could contribute to the prevention of this type of cancers, while highlighting redmeat and meat products consumption and alcohol among the factors that increase the disease's risk. The main message of this document is that the best prevention of colorectal cancer is the combination of higher physical activity with a fibre-rich and meat products poor diet. This information is useful the consumer who should make his food choices according to the scientific evidence. This contribution highlights challenges in communication and possible effects from the consumer perspective.

Reaching the poor with health, nutrition, and population services: What works, what doesn't, and why

by Suzanne Sicchia

Sicchia, S.R. (2006). Reaching the poor with health, nutrition, and population services: What works, what doesn’t, and why. [Book Review]. JECH, 60, 822.

Dissertation: Accounting for Taste: Regulating Food Labeling in the "Affluent Society," 1945-1995

by Xaq Frohlich

Doctoral Thesis, MIT, 2011. Thesis Supervisor: Deborah K. Fitzgerald. Other Committee Members: Susan S. Silbey, David S. Jones, Heather Paxson, and Sheila Jasanoff

This dissertation traces a transformation in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's governance of food markets during... more This dissertation traces a transformation in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's governance of food markets during the second half of the 20th century. In response to new correlations between diet and risk of disease, anxieties about (over)abundant food supplies, and changing notions of personal versus collective responsibility in an affluent society, the FDA changed how it regulated food labeling. Following WWII, the agency developed a set of standard recipes with
fixed common name labels (such as "peanut butter" or "tomato soup"), or "standards of identity," for all mass-produced foods. However, the appearance of new diet foods and public health concerns undermined this system. Beginning in the 1970s, the FDA shifted its policies. Rather than rely on standardized identities, the agency required companies to provide informative labels such as the ingredients panel, nutrition labels, and various science-based health claims. Agency officials believed that such information would enable consumers to make responsible health decisions through market purchases.

Food labeling is explored as a regulatory assemblage that draws together a variety of political, legal, corporate, and technoscientific interests and practices. The five chapters are organized chronologically. The first two describe how a shift in focus among nutrition scientists from concern for the undernourished to a concern with overeating led to the introduction onto the market of engineered foods capitalizing off popular interest in diet and health. A middle chapter describes a series of institutional scandals that generated the political animus to change the FDA's system, and registered a broader "shock of recognition" that Americans' views about food and food politics had changed. The final two chapters describe the introduction of "Nutrition Information" labeling in the 1970s and the mandatory "Nutrition Facts" panel in the 1990s. By looking at the regulation of labels as a kind of public-private infrastructure for information, the turn to compositional labeling can be understood not merely as a shift in representation-from whole foods to foods as nutrients-but more broadly as a retooling of food markets to embed notions about personal responsibility for health into the ways that food was designed, marketed, and consumed.
Thesis Supervisor: Deborah K. Fitzgerald

Nutrition and the Forest

by Sabrina Hardenbergh

La participación social como estrategia central de la nutrición comunitaria para afrontar los retos asociados a la transición nutricional

by José Carlos Suárez-Herrera

Suárez-Herrera, J. C., Serra-Majem, L., & O’Shanahan, J. J. (2009). La participación social como estrategia central de la nutrición comunitaria para afrontar los retos asociados a la transición nutricional. Revista Española de Salud Pública, 83(6), 791-803.

In last decades modern societies are undergoing a rapid nutrition transition process that reinforces, at international... more In last decades modern societies are undergoing a rapid nutrition transition process that reinforces, at international level, the emergence of nutritional problems of contradictory nature, such as malnutrition and obesity. This represents a considerable challenge for contemporary Public Health leaders, who have been gradually developing a set of strategies which overwhelmingly adopt a population perspective. Nevertheless, the collective nature of these strategies could neglect the particular individual and family needs.

We consider social participation as an approach to simultaneously reinforce both individual and population perspectives during the divers phases of development of Community Nutrition programs which tackle the paradoxical nature of this problematic. However in relation to some contextual factors, we find a growing trend to develop a more technocratic dimension of participatory practices, which distorts the emancipator and transformative potential of social participation.

In order to avoid this tendency, we propose the use of the five intervention axes of the Ottawa Chart for Health Promotion as a guide for a systemic integration of social participation in planning, implementation and evaluation processes of community Nutrition programs. We therefore take into account the integration of social participation in the efforts made in developing individual capacitybuilding, reinforcing collective action, creating enabling environments, health care reorganization, and finally, implementing nutritional and public health policies.

Nutrition, hygiene, and mortality. Setting parameters for Roman health and life expectancy consistent with our comparative evidence

by Geoffrey Kron

In E. Lo Cascio (a cura di), L’impatto della “peste antonina,” (Collana di Pragmateiai) (Bari: Edipuglia) (in press)

Any hypotheses regarding the likely long-term demographic impact of the Antonine plague will have to take into... more Any hypotheses regarding the likely long-term demographic impact of the Antonine plague will have to take into account, not only the cause of the epidemic, but also the underlying mortality and fertility regime of the Roman empire. Health, nutritional status and hygiene have a significant effect upon the virulence of some epidemics, while for others, like the bubonic plague, for example, they are largely irrelevant. But whatever the effect on the morbidity of the epidemic, the underlying mortality regime of the population will have a significant impact on determining both the extent to which the population will be able to absorb this excess mortality, and the extent to which it will or will not recover.

At least since the influential work of Keith Hopkins in the 1960’s, a broad consensus has emerged among ancient historians setting the life expectancy at birth in the Roman Principate and Empire at between 20 and 30 years of age, with most estimates falling on the lower end of this range, often below 25 years. As the trenchant critiques of Tim Parkin and Walter Scheidel have emphasized, however, solid evidence for the calculation of ancient life expectancy simply does not exist. Recent estimates must therefore remain largely educated guesses based on comparative evidence from early-industrial Europe or the contemporary Third World. I intend to argue that at least three strong considerations suggest that the present scholarly consensus is unrealistically low. .

First, a more careful reading of the modern demographic evidence will show that the life expectancies as low as those conjectured for Roman Italy are rarely documented for Western European societies, generally only in brief periods of extreme poverty and stress, or for limited segments of society.

Second, researchers of ancient demography have generally neglected the critical role of nutrition in the modern rise in life expectancy, as argued in a classic, if controversial, work by Thomas MacKeown, and confirmed by the correlation between the secular increase in heights and decline in mortality in modern Europe and North America drawn by Robert Fogel. In fact, anthropometric evidence of ancient heights suggests that Greco-Roman societies enjoyed a significantly higher biological standard of living than the working classes of 18th and 19th century Western Europe. Early industrial life expectancies are therefore likely to represent a floor, rather than a ceiling, for plausible Greco-Roman estimates.

Finally, there is evidence that, in addition to enjoying superior nutritional standards, Greco-Roman populations likely faced fewer health stresses from contaminated drinking water, over-crowding, poor hygiene and sanitation, lack of exercise, and social inequality generally than the poor of the European ancien régime.

Anthropometry, Physical Anthropology, and the Reconstruction of Ancient Health, Nutrition, and Living Standards

by Geoffrey Kron

Historia, Vol. LIV, 2005, pp. 68-83

Our Struggle with Malnutrition

by Mabel Segbafah

Extentions

Assessment of evaluations made to healthy eating policies in Europe: a review within the EATWELL Project

by Federico Jose Armando Perez-Cueto Eulert

Federico JA Pérez-Cueto1,*, Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, Bhavani Shankar, Jose Brambila-Macias, Tino Bech-Larsen, Mario Mazzocchi, Sara Capacci, Anna Saba, Aida Turrini, Barbara Niedzwiedzka, Beata Piorecka, AgniezskaKoziol-Kozakowska, Josephine Wills, W Bruce Traill and Wim Verbeke

doi:10.1017/S1368980011003107

Objective: To identify and assess healthy eating policies at national level which have been evaluated in terms of... more Objective: To identify and assess healthy eating policies at national level which have been evaluated in terms of their impact on awareness of healthy eating, food consumption, health outcome or cost/benefit.

Design: Review of policy documents and their evaluations when available.

Setting: European Member States.

Subjects: One hundred and twenty-one policy documents revised, 107 retained.

Results: Of the 107 selected interventions, twenty-two had been evaluated for their impact on awareness or knowledge and twenty-seven for their impact on consumption. Furthermore sixteen interventions provided an evaluation of health impact, while three actions specifically measured any cost/benefit ratio. The indicators used in these evaluations were in most cases not comparable. Evaluation was more often found for public information campaigns, regulation of meals at schools/canteens and nutrition education programmes.

Conclusions: The study highlights the need not only to develop harmonized and verifiable procedures but also indicators for measuring effectiveness and success and for comparing between interventions and countries. EU policies are Recommended to provide a set of indicators that may be measured consistently and regularly in all countries. Furthermore, public information campaigns should be accompanied by other interventions, as evaluations may show an iampact on awareness and intention, but rarely on consumption patterns and health outcome.

Greater fructose consumption is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors and visceral adiposity in adolescents

by Norman Pollock

Pollock NK, Bundy V, Kanto W, Davis CL, Bernard PJ, Zhu H, Gutin B, Dong Y. (2012) Greater fructose consumption is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors and visceral adiposity in adolescents. The Journal of Nutrition. 2012;142(2):251-257.

Natural Medicine for Common Ailments

by Poppy Valentine

This is a collection of non-synthetic health tips for common illnesses. This is a collection of non-synthetic health tips for common illnesses.

Rees R, O’Mara A, Dickson K, Stansfield C, Caird J, Thomas J (2011) Communities that cook: a systematic review of the effectiveness and appropriateness of interventions to introduce adults to home cooking [review protocol]. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London.

by Rebecca Rees

Food related ill health has been estimated to account for about 10% of ill-health and death in the UK, similar to that... more Food related ill health has been estimated to account for about 10% of ill-health and death in the UK, similar to that attributable to smoking. The prevalence of unhealthy diets in the UK and other Westernised societies has been linked in particular to increases in the availability of processed foods and pre-prepared and takeaway meals. While the influences on peoples’ diets in the UK are complex and manyfold, there has been concern that opportunities to learn how to prepare and cook food have been lost over the past few decades, leading to a loss of skills, knowledge and confidence. One of the responses to these concerns has been the development of community-based educational initiatives aimed at adults who want to learn to cook. Jamie Oliver’s ‘Ministry of Food’ initiative is perhaps the best-known of the home cooking initiatives currently being provided in the UK, although large numbers of schemes have been set up across the country. Often these initiatives have been part of a wider programme of developments to address barriers to healthy eating and ill-health more generally. While various forms of home cooking interventions have been tried out, and evaluations have been conducted, it appears that there has been no recent systematic attempt to pull together and appraise the findings of the range of evaluation studies that exists. The systematic review described in this protocol aims to address this gap. It will examine claims for home cooking initiatives, exploring their effects on various outcomes, the section of the population that is ultimately reached by them, and what, in practice, is required for their implementation.

Trends in food availability in Belgium – the DAFNE III project

by Federico Jose Armando Perez-Cueto Eulert

Belgian Report of the DAFNE III Project by
A.-M. Remaut-De Winter and FJA Perez Cueto Eulert

Three consecutive Belgian Household Budget Survey Datasets (1987/88, 1996/97 and 1999) were used to describe trends in... more Three consecutive Belgian Household Budget Survey Datasets (1987/88, 1996/97 and 1999) were used to describe trends in food availability at household level. Data were presented according to the educational achievement of the household head, the locality of the household, occupation of the household head and household composition. Sociodemographic differences were observed and described in detail.