Processed foods and the nutrition transition: evidence from Asia

This paper elucidates the role of processed foods and beverages in the ‘nutrition transition’ underway in Asia. Processed foods tend to be high in nutrients associated with obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases: refined sugar, salt, saturated and trans-fats. This paper identifies the most significant ‘product vectors’ for these nutrients and describes changes in their consumption in a selection of Asian countries. Sugar, salt and fat consumption from processed foods has plateaued in high-income countries, but has rapidly increased in the lower– middle and upper–middle-income countries. Relative to sugar and salt, fat consumption in the upper–middle- and lower–middle-income countries is converging most rapidly with that of high-income countries. Carbonated soft drinks, baked goods, and oils and fats are the most significant vectors for sugar, salt and fat respectively. At the regional level there appears to be convergence in consumption patterns of processed foods, but country-level divergences including high levels of consumption of oils and fats in Malaysia, and soft drinks in the Philippines and Thailand. This analysis suggests that more action is needed by policy-makers to prevent or mitigate processed food consumption. Comprehensive policy and regulatory approaches are most likely to be effective in achieving these goals

Real readers, real writers and a home-grown experience

As with many good innovations, it began with a real and pressing problem. We wanted the students at St Ninians Primary, a large city school for children aged 5-12 years, to develop a sense of audience for their writing. In Scotland, story writing is commonly taught using story frames and planning sheets that ask students to identify the characters, the setting, the initiating problem/event and the resolution. Despite this support, students often omit important details and find it hard to 'decentre' and consider their writing from the reader's perspective. This is a vital part of becoming an author: "A sense of authorship comes from the struggle to put something big and vital into print, and from seeing one's own printed words reach the heats and minds of readers." (Calkins, 1986

Calibration of conditional composite likelihood for Bayesian inference on Gibbs random fields

Gibbs random fields play an important role in statistics, however, the resulting likelihood is typically unavailable due to an intractable normalizing constant. Composite likelihoods offer a principled means to construct useful approximations. This paper provides a mean to calibrate the posterior distribution resulting from using a composite likelihood and illustrate its performance in several examples.Comment: JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), San Diego, California, USA, 9-12 May 2015 (Vol. 38, pp. 921-929). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1207.575

Microprobe and oxygen fugacity study of armalcolite

The stability of synthetic armalcolite was determined as a function of oxygen fugacity with particular regard to the oxidation state of iron and titanium. The equilibrium pseudobrookite (armalcolite) composition was measured at 1200 C under various conditions of oxidation typical of the lunar environment. These data, when compared with published descriptions of mare basalts, provide information about the conditions of crystallization of armalcolite-bearing lunar rocks. Some information about the crystal chemistry of armalcolite was obtained from X-ray diffraction and electron microprobe analyses of synthetic armalcolite and Zr-armalcolite. Further data were gathered from a comparison of the Mossbauer spectra of a phase pure stoichiometric armalcolite and one containing appreciable amounts of trivalent titanium

Climate change adaptation: where does global health fit into the agenda?

The aim of this paper is to highlight the opportunities to improve health and reduce health inequities via the new and additional funding that is available for climate change adaptation activities.Human-induced climate change will affect the lives of most populations in the next decade and beyond. It will have greatest, and generally earliest, impact on the poorest and most disadvantaged populations on the planet. Changes in climatic conditions and increases in weather variability affect human wellbeing, safety, health and survival in many ways. Some impacts are direct-acting and immediate, such as impaired food yields and storm surges. Other health effects are less immediate and typically occur via more complex causal pathways that involve a range of underlying social conditions and sectors such as water and sanitation, agriculture and urban planning. Climate change adaptation is receiving much attention given the inevitability of climate change and its effects, particularly in developing contexts, where the effects of climate change will be experienced most strongly and the response mechanisms are weakest. Financial support towards adaptation activities from various actors including the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations is increasing substantially. With this new global impetus and funding for adaptation action come challenges such as the importance of developing adaptation activities on a sound understanding of baseline community needs and vulnerabilities, and how these may alter with changes in climate. The global health community is paying heed to the strengthening focus on adaptation, albeit in a slow and unstructured manner.&nbsp