Engaging Students Through Collaboration: How Project FUN Works

Students from three disciplines designed, developed, and implemented exercise and nutrition interventions, online modules and videos, to benefit low-income middle school students. The process used to incorporate the scholarship of teaching into a collaborative college-level application of learning is described

Addressing Health Disparities in Middle School Students’ Nutrition and Exercise

Those with low income, especially women of African American and Hispanic heritage have the greatest risk of inactivity and obesity. A 4-session (Internet and video) intervention with healthy snack and gym labs was tested in 2 (gym lab in 1) urban low–middle-income middle schools to improve low fat diet and moderate and vigorous physical activity.1 The gym lab was particularly beneficial (p = .002). Fat in diet decreased with each Internet session in which students participated. Percentage of fat in food was reduced significantly p = .018 for Black, White, and Black/Native American girls in the intervention group. Interventions delivered through Internet and video may enable reduction of health disparities in students by encouraging those most at risk to consume 30% or less calories from fat and to engage in moderate and vigorous physical activity

Realising the food security benefits of canned fish for Pacific Island countries

Canned fish is a healthy alternative to the poor-quality, imported, processed foods implicated in the rise of non-communicable diseases in Pacific Island countries. Increased availability and consumption of canned fish also promises to help fill the gap between sustainable coastal fish production and recommended intake of fish for good nutrition. This study estimates the recent contribution of canned products to fish supply in Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Solomon Islands, based on the quantities of imported and locally-produced canned fish sold on domestic markets. The greatest quantities of canned fish were sold in PNG, however, average annual consumption of canned fish per capita was highest in Fiji (8.8 ± 1.3 kg) and Solomon Islands (5.9 ± 0.6 kg), where it supplied an average of 25 ± 4% and 17 ± 2% of recommended dietary fish intake, respectively. Canned tuna comprised an average of 53 ± 2% of the canned fish consumption in Fiji and 92 ± 1% in Solomon Islands. Key actions needed to maintain/increase per capita consumption of canned fish in Pacific Island countries include promoting the health benefits of canned tuna to help combat non-communicable diseases, and facilitating distribution of locally-canned products, especially to the inland population of PNG. Increasing the market share of locally-canned tuna by assisting national canneries to obtain sufficient supplies of tuna to achieve economies of scale and compete effectively in both domestic and intra-regional canned fish trade, could create more employment and contribute indirectly to local food security

Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users’ understandings of a policy’s impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas