Health Aspects Of Food Research Articles

Young students' perception of the health perspective in the Norwegian school subject Food and Health

In Norway, Food and Health (FH) is taught throughout compulsory school. Data acquisition for this study consists of 15 interviews with teachers and 26 focus group interviews (FGI) with 4th grade students (9-10 years), from eleven different schools in five regions in Norway. The data provides insight into experiences with FH, perceptions of the health aspect of FH, and learning activities to achieve the subject’s competence aims. Students divided FH into "practical sessions”, consisting of preparing, cooking, and eating food, and "health sessions", consisting of theory related to different health aspects of food and lifestyle habits. Most students reported that they had few FH sessions at school. Instead, they referred to activities at home, in after-school care, and what parents and grandparents had told them about the subject. High-quality education in school, focusing on dietary advice, food groups, and supporting physical health is important to promote healthier dietary habits in young students.

Food process ontology requirements

People often value the sensual, celebratory, and health aspects of food, but behind this experience exists many other value-laden agricultural production, distribution, manufacturing, and physiological processes that support or undermine a healthy population and a sustainable future. The complexity of such processes is evident in both every-day food preparation of recipes and in industrial food manufacturing, packaging and storage, each of which depends critically on human or machine agents, chemical or organismal ingredient references, and the explicit instructions and implicit procedures held in formulations or recipes. An integrated ontology landscape does not yet exist to cover all the entities at work in this farm to fork journey. It seems necessary to construct such a vision by reusing expert-curated fit-to-purpose ontology subdomains and their relationship, material, and more abstract organization and role entities. The challenge is to make this merger be, by analogy, one language, rather than nouns and verbs from a dozen or more dialects which cannot be used directly in statements about some aspect of the farm to fork journey without expensive translation or substantial dialect education in order to understand a particular text or domain of knowledge. This work focuses on the ontology components – object and data properties and annotations – needed to model food processes or more general process modelling within the context of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry and congruent ontologies. Ideally these components can be brought together in a general process ontology that can be specialized not only for the food domain but for carrying out other protocols as well. Many operations involved in food identification, preparation, transportation and storage – shaking, boiling, mixing, freezing, labeling, shipping – are actually common to activities from manufacturing and laboratory work to local or home food preparation.

Effects of Mindset and Dietary Restraint on Attention Bias for Food and Food Intake.

Evidence for attention bias (AB) for food in restrained eaters is inconsistent. A person’s mindset related to food – that is, whether someone focuses on the hedonic or health aspects of food – might be an overlooked influence on AB for food, possibly explaining the inconsistency in the literature. Fluctuations between a hedonic versus a health mindset might be strongest in restrained eaters, who have a conflicted relationship with food. We investigated the effect of mindset and dietary restraint on AB for food and food intake. We hypothesized that AB for food, as reflected in eye-movement measures and manual response latencies, as well as food intake, would be larger in the hedonic than in the health mindset, most strongly in participants scoring high on dietary restraint. Moreover, we expected a positive correlation between AB for food and food intake, especially in the hedonic mindset. We used short video clips to induce either a health or hedonic mindset. Subsequently, participants (n = 122) performed a modified additional singleton task with pictures of high-caloric food vs neutral pictures as irrelevant distractors. Next, food intake was measured in a bogus taste test. We found no evidence for an AB towards food, nor any moderation by either mindset or dietary restraint. Food intake tended to be higher for participants scoring higher on dietary restraint, but effects were not moderated by mindset. Response-latency based AB for food tended to correlate positively with food intake in the hedonic mindset. Taken together, our hypotheses regarding AB for food were largely not confirmed. We provide suggestions on how to improve upon the specific implementations of our AB task and mindset manipulation, to strengthen future research in this field.

Validation of a nutrition knowledge questionnaire in Italian students attending the University of Parma.

The aim of this study was to assess the validity and reliability of a self-administered nutrition knowledge (NK) questionnaire for Italian university students. The NK questionnaire included ninety questions on experts' nutritional recommendations, nutritional content of food, health aspects of food and diets, relationship between diet and diseases, and proper food choices. It was administered to the same population under the same conditions on two different occasions with a time interval of 3 weeks between the two administrations. The survey was carried out at the University of Parma (Italy) during the 2018-2019 academic year. Data were collected for 132 bachelor and master degree students attending the University of Parma, either attending or not nutrition classes during their studies (19-30 years, 29·5 % males, 57·6 % with an academic nutrition background). The questionnaire revealed high overall internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's α > 0·8) and a good temporal stability with high correlation of the total score (r = 0·835, P < 0·001). Moreover, it showed a good ability to discriminate between subjects with potentially different NK. This NK questionnaire proved to be a reliable, valid and easy-to-use tool for assessing the NK of Italian university students, either with or without nutrition background.

Effective Segmentation of Organic Food Consumers in Vietnam Using Food-Related Lifestyles

The consumer purchase of environmentally friendly products like organic food is essential to environmental sustainability. This study applies the unique food-related lifestyles (FRL) approach to segment organic food consumers in Vietnam, a country in which there is increasing concern about food safety and quality. The FRL model was intentionally selected because it enables better understanding of how consumers employ food and its culinary aspects to achieve certain values in their lives. Data were obtained from 203 organic food consumers, and a two-step cluster analysis established three identifiable market segments which we named “Conservatives”, “Trendsetters”, and “Unengaged”. The Conservatives were interested in the health aspects of food and preferred natural products. The Trendsetters were interested in healthy food, liked to cook, and held a positive attitude toward organic food and local food products. The Unengaged consumers were not concerned about food-related issues, and they reported the least consumption of organic food. The findings of this study have important academic and practical implications for marketers, policymakers, organizations dealing with food, and socio-environmental organizations that aim to promote organic food consumption. Importantly, marketing efforts should focus on enhancing consumers’ knowledge about organic food and their love of cooking, as well as ensuring adequate availability of organic food.

Do we really know the composition of our foods?

We are currently witnessing important changes in the feeding patterns of the world population, especially in developing countries. These changes are leading to higher incidence of overweight, obesity, and non-communicable chronic diseases. These changes are influenced by a series of factors regarding the food, the individual, and the environment, which determine the selection of foods to buy and consume. The knowledge of our foods, such as their composition and the technological and cooking processes, among others, is important given their impact on the nutritional status and health. One of the key steps in the decision of what foods we incorporate to our diet is the time spent for shopping. Therefore, it would be important to develop standardized and computerized systems for food classification that connected to databases of foods composition could bring real time information about nutrients and energy content, as well as other food components. The most developed system so far is Lan guaL ("Langua aLimentaria"). We should also be knowledgeable on how cooking modifies not only the orosensorial properties but also the nutritional and health aspects of foods. Nowadays it is almost essential to also be informed about the foods we consume out of our homes, such as in collective canteens or restaurants given the work and school timetables, as well as leisure time.

A case of champagne: A study of geographical indications

The urgency of securing food supply has increased dramatically in a period when the GFC, environmental degradation, global warming and the rapid increase in industrialised food production has revealed the fragility of the world’s food production systems. In July 2012, Australia published its first Green Paper on food security. noting; ‘in the next 30 years the world will have to produce 70% more food to feed the world’s growing population’.[1] In the same month, the US Congress commenced a legislative debate about policy directions and public funding through taxation for farm subsidies to American primary producers. In May 2012, The Canadian government introduced the first National Food Strategy, to manage failures of the social security system to provide adequate and nourishing food to around 800,000 Canadians. In July 2013, the Indian government issued an ordinance to give the nation’s population the right to get 5kgs of food grains every month at highly subsidised rates. This will be the biggest food security program on the planet. Food policy involves vital challenges in humanitarian, health and environmental law. Food law and governance plays an important role in facilitating the transition to sustainable agriculture and food security. The Centre for Commercial Law is embarking on a project to produce international publications, colloquia, presentations and research analysing and proposing reform to areas in food law. Our mission is to conduct research and publishing in the vital area of Food Governance and Food Security policy making, celebrating food, local terroir and its relationship with society. The Centre provides legal studies of culinary modernism, tourism, restaurants, the gourmet and health aspects of food, wine and trade law. Our first contribution, the fruit of a successful Colloquium on Food and Law in 2012, is on Champagne and Geographical Indications. It is both informative. enjoyable and a little long on taste, like a fine wine. [1] National Food Plan, DAFF, 2012

Consumer perceptions of the effectiveness of food risk management practices: A cross-cultural study

Consumer perceptions of food hazards and how the associated risks are managed are likely to be an important determinant of consumer confidence in food safety. While there is a body of research that examines public perceptions of various types of food hazards, less attention has been directed to understanding how the public perceives food risk management practices. Utilizing elements of the repertory grid approach in focus group discussions, this research explored public attitudes regarding the effectiveness of current food risk management practices in four European countries (Denmark, Germany, Greece and the UK). While the issue of food safety did not emerge as a key factor in everyday food choice, participants were concerned about health aspects of food. There were three main factors that participants considered to be evidence of ‘good’ food risk management: the existence of identifiable control systems that respond quickly to contain a risk, the instigation of preventive measures and the availability of information that offers individuals the ability to exercise informed choice. These evaluations were similar in each of the countries under consideration and were linked to ideas regarding the controllability of risks and to questions of who is responsible for managing the risks.

Making More of Milk Sugar by Engineering Lactic Acid Bacteria

By exploiting their genetic and metabolic capacity, lactic acid bacteria can be used to generate a variety of products from milk sugar lactose other than the archetypical lactic acid. This review will outline the different genetic and metabolic engineering strategies that can be applied to lactic acid bacteria to realize this valorization of lactose. Attention will be given to the controlled production, by lactic acid bacteria, of enzymes that convert lactose. In addition, we will summarize the progress and potential of redirecting the metabolic flux from lactose to produce existing, modified, and novel metabolites. Examples to be discussed include the production of compounds that are relevant for the flavour, texture, and health aspects of foods.

The future for milk products in the EEC

The future of milk products must be set against a static European population of increasing age, already generally overfed, and a greater public emphasis on health aspects of foods. Patterns of consumption in the main countries of the EEC are examined with particular reference to the German market. It is suggested that dairy products can expand their share of the market only by replacing other foods, and that this might best be done not by the marketing of mass products but by introducing variety and segmentation of products.