One-Year Evaluation of the Wellness in the Schools Program on School Lunch Consumption of Fruits, Vegetables, and Salad Bar Items in Urban Elementary Students

Children in the United States do not eat enough fruits and vegetables to meet current dietary guidelines of 1 to 1.5 cups of fruits, and 1.5 to 2 cups of vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are an important source of various nutrients, and higher consumption of fruits and vegetables help children meet adequate nutrition needs for physical growth, and to lower risk of various chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. School-based nutrition or wellness intervention programs by local governments or non-profit organizations are part of the multi- prong approach to help increase fruit and vegetable consumption in children. One such school-based wellness intervention program based in New York City is Wellness In The Schools (WITS). WITS is a non-profit organization with the aim of implementing programs in schools that help facilitate healthy eating and positive group play in children. The two main arms of the WITS programming is the Cook for Kids and Coach for Kids programs. Overall, the goal of the WITS Cook for Kids program is to increase fruit and vegetable consumption, decrease processed foods consumed, and improve the perception of school lunch; the goal of the WITS Coach for Kids program is to increase physical activity, increase pro-social behaviors and team-based activities, and decrease schoolyard bullying at recess. A WITS Chef and a WITS Coach are placed in each school and work alongside school food and recess aids on every school day during the first year of intervention. This dissertation study investigated the impact of one-year of WITS programming, as well as school lunch environmental factors, on school lunch consumption of fruits, vegetables, and salad bar items, in 2nd and 3rd grade students. The study utilized a non-randomized controlled trial design, with seven intervention schools receiving the WITS programming, and seven matched control schools. Intervention schools received the WITS programming starting from September 2015 that continued through the last week of June 2016 when the school year ended, while control schools did not receive any WITS programming. This study is significant in that it evaluated a real-world health program using a large sample of schools with match controls, along with using valid and reliable methods assessing multiple outcome measures of food consumption and environmental factors. WITS intervention and Control schools in this study were in an urban setting with high percentage of minority and high percentage poverty. The first research question explored the differences in consumption of fruits, vegetables, and salad bar items at school lunch for 2nd and 3rd grade students. Comparisons were made between WITS intervention schools and Control schools, 2nd grade students and 3rd grade students, and girls and boys, after one year of the WITS intervention programming. School lunch food on tray and consumption of students was assessed by observation over three school days for each school at Time 0 and Time 1 study time periods. About thirty students were observed each observation day for each school, totaling over 1300 student observations each study time period. The second research question focused on testing the impact of various school lunch environmental factors on 2nd and 3rd grade students’ consumption of fruits, vegetables, and salad bar items at school lunch. The school lunch environmental factors included: time duration of school lunch, wait time before getting school lunch, order of lunch and recess, pre-plating of fruits on lunch trays, slicing of fruits, whole fruits in an attractive serving bowl, number of fruit options, position of vegetables in lunch line, pre-plating of vegetables on lunch trays, number of vegetable options, position of salad bar, and number of salad bar items. These school lunch environmental factors were assessed using observation. This study found that there were no differences in consumption of fruits, vegetables, and salad bar items between WITS intervention schools and Control schools at Time 0 or at Time 1. This study did find that 3rd grade students ate more fruits and salad than 2nd grade students, when analyzed for only students who had the food item on the tray and when analyzed for all students. Students in 3rd grade ate significantly more vegetable than students in 2nd grade, analyzed within students that had vegetable on tray. Additionally, more 3rd grade students had any salad on tray than 2nd grade students. This study also found that across all students, girls ate more fruits and salad than boys. More girls had any fruit and salad on tray than boys, and across all students, more girls ate any fruit and salad than boys. Having lunch after recess, and slicing or pre-cutting of fruits were found to have a significant positive correlation with fruit consumption across all students. However, displaying whole fruits being served in an attractive serving bowl were found to have a significant negative correlation with fruit consumption across all students. Pre-plating of vegetables on lunch trays, and having two or more vegetable options were found to have a significant positive correlation with vegetable consumption across all students. Only wait time before getting school lunch was found to have a significant positive correlation with salad consumption across all students. The WITS programming might not have been executed in full due to real-world limitations, which may have contributed to the lack of differences in fruit, vegetable and salad consumption between WITS intervention and Control schools. Future review of the level of implementation of all the components of the WITS programming would allow for improvements in the execution of the programming. The findings from this study also indicate that some school lunch environmental factors could have strong influences on the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and salad bar items. Interventions working on increasing fruit and vegetable consumption could thus consider incorporating steps to manipulate these factors to improve the impact of their programming

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

A COMMON GENETIC ETIOLOGY FOR IMPULSIVITY AND OVEREATING

10.3153/fh18024Food and Health44247-25

Location of School Lunch Salad Bars in Cafeterias: Design and Analysis Issues

10.1016/j.jand.2016.04.020JOURNAL OF THE ACADEMY OF NUTRITION AND DIETETICS11671077-107

Psychosocial Influences on Fruit and Vegetable Intake Following a NYC Supermarket Discount

10.1002/oby.21876OBESITY2581321-132

Preferences and willingness-to-pay for a blood pressure telemonitoring program using a discrete choice experiment

Abstract This study aimed to elicit the preferences and willingness-to-pay for blood pressure (BP) telemonitoring programs. This study also investigated the different factors or participant characteristics that could influence preferences and choice behaviors. Participants with hypertension were identified from an online survey panel demographically representative of Singapore’s general population. Participants completed a discrete choice experiment (DCE) with 12 choice sets, selecting their preferred BP monitoring program differing on five attributes: mode of consultation, BP machine type (with Bluetooth or not), BP machine price, monthly fee, and program duration. The base reference population (male, married, higher income, more formal education years, full-time worker, aged 55 to <65 years, and digital skills score of 36) preferred teleconsultation over in-person consultation, Bluetooth feature, lower machine price, lower monthly fee, and shorter program duration. A subgroup of participants can be considered teleconsultation-resistant, and three demographic factors were associated with lower preference for teleconsultation: female, fewer formal education years, and lower income. Considering the reference population and Bluetooth attribute, participants were willing to pay 66 SGD (~49 USD) additional for the machine to obtain the Bluetooth feature. Considering the reference population and teleconsultation attribute, participants were willing to pay 6.80 SGD (~5.10 USD) extra monthly fee for a program using teleconsultation. Here we report that amongst participants with hypertension, there is strong preference for the use of teleconsultation and a BP machine with Bluetooth feature in a BP monitoring program. However, a subgroup of participants are teleconsultation-resistant and would prefer in-person consultation

Response to Validity and Reliability of Behavior and Theory-Based Psychosocial Determinants Measures, Using Audience Response System Technology in Urban Upper-Elementary Schoolchildren: Limitations of Pearson ' s r and Percent Agreement

10.1016/j.jneb.2016.07.013JOURNAL OF NUTRITION EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR4810757-75

Validity and Reliability of Behavior and Theory-Based Psychosocial Determinants Measures, Using Audience Response System Technology in Urban Upper-Elementary Schoolchildren

10.1016/j.jneb.2016.03.018JOURNAL OF NUTRITION EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR487437-45