A Dietary Assessment Training Course Path: The Italian IV SCAI Study on Children Food Consumption

The eating patterns in a population can be estimated through dietary surveys in which open-ended assessment methods, such as diaries and interviews, or semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaires are administered. A harmonized dietary survey methodology, together with a standardized operational procedure, in conducting the study is crucial to ensure the comparability of the results and the accuracy of information, thus reducing uncertainty and increasing the reliability of the results. Dietary patterns (i) include several target variables (foods, energy and nutrients, other food components), (ii) require several explanatory variables (age, gender, anthropometric measurements, socio-cultural and economic characteristics, lifestyle, preferences, attitudes, beliefs, organization of food-related activities, etc.), and (iii) have impacts in several domains: imbalance diets; acute and chronic exposures affect health, specifically non-communicable diseases; and then sanitary expenditure. On the other hand, food demand has impacts on the food system: production, distribution, and food services system; food wastes and other wastes generated by food-related activities of the households (e.g., packaging disposal) have consequences on the “health of the planet” which in turn can have effects on human health. Harmonization and standardization of measurement methods and procedures in such a complex context require an ad hoc structured information system made by databases (food nomenclatures, portion sizes, food atlas, recipes) and methodological tools (quantification methods, food coding systems, assessment of nutritional status, data processing to extrapolate what we consider validated dietary data). Establishing a community of professionals specialized in dietary data management could lead to build a surveillance system for monitoring eating habits in the short term, thus reducing costs, and to arrange a training re-training system. Creating and maintaining the dietary data managers community is challenging but possible. In this context, the cooperation between the CREA Research Centre for Food and Nutrition and the Italian National Health Institute (ISS) promoted and supported by the Italian Ministry of Health may represent a model of best practice that can ensure a continuous training for the professional community carrying out a nutritional study

Sustainability of schools: a multidisciplinary approach to studying air quality in educational buildings

This work reports the preliminary results of the “Sustainability of Schools” (SoS) project, a multidisciplinary project funded by Roma TRE University which involves the departments of architecture, engineering, economics, mathematics and physics, and sciences at Roma Tre University and the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine Epidemiology and Hygiene of Italian Workers' Compensation Authority (INAIL). Healthy indoor air and thermal comfort are important for any type of building, but they play an essential role in teaching and learning processes because the intellectual activities are intimately conditioned by these. There is a significant bibliography on the indoor environment in office buildings, while few studies have been focused on educational buildings. The main objective of this project is to form a research team with specific areas of expertise in different fields aimed at defining technologies, methodologies, and protocols to assess the use for health, wellbeing, and energy saving in educational buildings. In this preliminary report of activity, two types of construction have been chosen as case studies, representative of a large number of Italian schools. A building of the first kind, prefabricated and built during the 1960s, is located on the Rome seaside. Two buildings of the second kind are historical properties of Roma Tre University in Rome downtown and are representative of a large number of masonry buildings with thermal mass. Here we present a multidisciplinary methodological approach for measuring indoor air quality parameters (i.e. temperature, relative humidity, concentration of pollutants, presence of ionizing radiation, biotic and abiotic factors) and the development of a class of numerical models. Overall, we paved the way for the future development of more advanced models integrating measures and models