Organic school meals in three Danish municipalities

In order to prevent children and young people from becoming overweight or obese, it is imperative to promote healthier eating patterns. So it is necessary to develop and implement effective strategies that can influence the eating and lifestyle habits of young people. Healthy school meal programme is considered to be an effective strategy to promote such changes and increasingly such strategies become embedded organic supply polices and strategies that pursue environmental goals. The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look into the current status of the organic school meal programme in Denmark. Three municipalities which are involved in the organic school meal programme are chosen as the study subjects

An illustration of web survey methododlogy

A former study in the Danish primary schools has shown that there is an association between organic school food policies and indicators (proxies) for healthy eating among children when (school food coordinators) statements on indicators (proxies) for healthy eating are used as variable. This project continue to search for the above signs of associations but involving also a “bottom” level (pupils) perspective in addition to the “top” level (school food coordinators) in the previous study. The project is to study the following hypothesis: organic food service praxis/policy (POP) is associated with praxis/policies for healthier eating in Danish school food service. In other words if organic procurement policies and the resulting praxis in schools can help build a healthier eating habits among pupils in such school as compared to schools without organic policies/praxis. The last perspective is going to be studied in a comparative study design where the Danish case (existing data from WBQ) will be compared with new data from school food service in Germany, Italy and Finland. These data is going to be collected through a web survey

Does organic food intervention in the Danish schools lead to change dietary patterns? - results of a web based questionnaire survey among Danish school food coordinators

Now, more than ever, there are serious health concerns for the growing prevalence of obese and overweight children. Schools are well suited setting for the learning of children and young people, and this influence has the potential to play an important role in preventing children from becoming obese and overweight. The school at the same time is the focus of public organic food supply strategies as well as the focus of innovation strategies that can increase the availability of healthier food options. These strategies in some cases go hand in hand. The purpose of this research was to examine whether organic food intervention strategies in school meal system could support the development of healthier eating patterns among children and adolescents. An important precondition for this is that the food environment becomes supportive for such eating. In the current study this was determined through the comparisons between the food strategies of “organic” school to that of “non organic” schools in Denmark. Provision of meals in Danish schools in not compulsory and function as a “value adding service” that schools and municipalities can decide on locally. Therefore the study was undertaken among school food coordinators in selected Danish primary schools that were known to provide school meals. The study was conducted by means of a web-based questionnaire. The data shows the relations regarding the school food service between different types of schools, and also based on the ways and methods of food provision. Results indicate that organic food intervention strategies can be supportive for strategies that increase the healthiness of school eating environments. This eventually might play a positive role in the efforts done to counteract the development of obesity and overweight issues among the children in these selected Danish schools

Measuring Majorana fermions qubit state and non-Abelian braiding statistics in quenched inhomogeneous spin ladders

We study the Majorana fermions (MFs) in a spin ladder model. We propose and numerically show that the MFs qubit state can be read out by measuring the fusion excitation in the quenched inhomogeneous spin ladders. Moreover, we construct an exactly solvable T-junction spin ladder model, which can be used to implement braiding operations of MFs. With the braiding processes simulated numerically as non-equilibrium quench processes, we verify that the MFs in our spin ladder model obey the non-Abelian braiding statistics. Our scheme not only provides a promising platform to study the exotic properties of MFs, but also has broad range of applications in topological quantum computation.Comment: 5+3 pages, 6 figure

Distinct Spin Liquids and their Transitions in Spin-1/2 XXZ Kagome Antiferromagnets

By using the density matrix renormalization group, we study the spin-liquid phases of spin-$1/2$ XXZ kagome antiferromagnets. We find that the emergence of spin liquid phase does not depend on the anisotropy of the XXZ interaction. In particular, the two extreme limits---Ising (strong $S^z$ interaction) and XY (zero $S^z$ interaction)---host the same spin-liquid phases as the isotropic Heisenberg model. Both the time-reversal-invariant spin liquid and the chiral spin liquid with spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking are obtained. We show they evolve continuously into each other by tuning the second- and third-neighbor interactions. At last, we discuss the possible implication of our results on the nature of spin liquid in nearest neighbor XXZ kagome antiferromagnets, including the most studied nearest neighbor spin-$1/2$ kagome anti-ferromagnetic Heisenberg model