Vegetables: New Zealand Children Are Not Eating Enough

We know that eating a variety of vegetables every day is associated with favorable health across the lifecourse. Internationally, food-based dietary guidelines encourage the consumption of a variety of vegetables and fruit but globally,people are not eating enough vegetables to meet the three-or-more-a-day guideline. Vegetables are good sources of vitamins and minerals, fiber, and many bioactive compounds that promote health and provide energy. They also help reduce hidden hunger (micronutrient deficiencies) and support the healthy growth and development of children. New Zealand is a world leader in the production of diverse nutrients and foods yet poverty and other environmental barriers mean only one in two children eats three-or-more servings of vegetables a day. Price and availability are limiting factors. The proliferation of community, school and home vegetable gardens and vegetable cooperatives may improve access. On a macro level, upstream policies such as a “living wage,” affordable housing, and land-use planning are required. International dietary solutions include an agricultural shift to intensified horticulture with a focus on vegetables. The consumption of more plant-based foods including vegetables would reduce green-house gases, reduce land clearing, and help prevent diet-related disease if consumed daily across the lifecourse

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Seasonality, resource stress, and food sharing in so-called "egalitarian" foraging societies

Most discussions of food sharing among so-called "egalitarian" hunters and gatherers implicitly assume that, because all adult members of a group participate in the network of sharing, all must therefore be receiving portions of more or less equivalent nutritional worth. This assumption is questioned and five basic points are raised: (1) because fat is not uniformly distributed over the carcass of an animal and because it is depleted sequentially when an animal is stressed, certain individuals may receive nutritionally inferior portions of meat, with potentially serious health consequences for the recipients during seasonal or interannual periods when other food resources are in short supply; (2) even when sharing is quantitatively and nutritionally equitable, food taboos may block certain individuals from access to meat and/or fat, particularly children, women at critical stages in their reproductive life, and the elderly (however, in the case of pregnant women, such food taboos and seemingly inequitable sharing practices may have positive as well as negative consequences for the health and survivorship of the fetus or newborn infant by keeping maternal protein consumption below about 20% of total calories and by reducing the mother's risk of exposure to potentially teratogenic substances that may accumulate in animal tissues); (3) skilled hunters may acquire nutritionally more valuable parts than do other males by "snacking" at kill sites and through differential sharing; (4) food-sharing practices and food taboos vary widely among foragers, and this diversity may contribute to observed differences among groups in fertility and infant mortality patterns; and (5) the focus of anthropologists on the sharing of food, especially meat, as opposed to the sharing of a broad spectrum of social, political, economic, and sexual rights and privileges, is an overly narrow and potentially misleading perspective. In closing, the paper briefly discusses the utility of the term "egalitarian," concluding that the concept, by conflating ideology with actual behavior, may obscure rather than enhance our understanding of the origins and adaptations of foraging societies.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/28530/1/0000327.pd

Crop Remix? Farmer's Crop Choice in Response to Covid-19 Evidence from Burkina Faso

Half a billion households around the world are smallholder agricultural households. These households are at a unique risk to unexpected shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper looks at how planting behavior changes from before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We leverage household panel data from Burkina Faso where information on planting behavior was collected before the outbreak of the virus. Our main findings are that households who had the opportunity to change crops for the 2020 and 2021 growing seasons indeed changed crops. Additionally, households grew more cereal crops (especially maize) after the pandemic than before, while household use of agricultural inputs did not meaningfully change Further examination is needed to understand if the households resist changing crops due to effects from the pandemic or due to unrelated factors

Vegetable‐enriched bread: Pilot and feasibility study of measurement of changes in skin carotenoid concentrations by reflection spectroscopy as a biomarker of vegetable intake

Abstract Globally, bread is a staple food and thus a promising vehicle for the delivery of nutrients from vegetables including carotenoids. The aim of this pilot/feasibility, pre–post experimental study was to measure skin (Veggie Meter™) and plasma carotenoid concentrations 1 week before (week −1), immediately prior to (week 0), and after (week 2) 14 days of daily consumption of 200 g pumpkin‐ and sweetcorn‐enriched bread (VB). At each measurement point, total vegetable and fruit intake and specific carotenoid‐rich foods were assessed by questionnaire. Participants (n = 10, 8 males, 2 females) were aged between 19 and 39 years and weighed 90 ± 20 kg. Vegetable and fruit intake was low and less than one serving/day of foods containing carotenoids. Prior to the intervention, measures of carotenoid‐containing foods and skin or plasma carotenoids were not different when measured a week apart. Consumption of the VB did not result in statistically significant changes in either the skin or plasma carotenoid measurements. Plasma carotenoid concentrations and the carotenoid reflection scores had a large and positive (r = .845, 95% CI 0.697, 0.924) association. The relationship between the number of servings of carotenoid‐rich foods with the plasma carotenoid and carotenoid reflection scores was positive and of moderate strength. In conclusion, carotenoid status was not measurably changed with the consumption of 200 g VB each day for 2 weeks. Subjective carotenoid‐rich food intake was positively associated with objective biomarkers of carotenoids. The Veggie meter™ has the potential to provide portable measurement of circulating carotenoids and be indicative of intake of carotenoid‐rich foods

Swallowing and Liking of Vegetable-Enriched Bread Compared With Commercial Breads as Evaluated by Older Adults

Characteristics of food that influence liking and ease-of-chewing and swallowing are not well-understood. Reformulation of bread to improve nutrient density may improve liking, ease-of-chewing and swallowing which could improve dietary intake particularly with aging. The study aimed to compare objectively and subjectively four breads of increasing nutrient density: $1 white (WB) and wheatmeal (WMB) commercial breads and two in-house formulations of vegetable-enriched breads (VB75 or VB100) which incorporated drum-dried pumpkin and sweet corn flours for physical, sensory and ease-of-chewing and swallowing properties. Each bread underwent instrumental texture analysis. The commercial and vegetable-enriched breads were not different by hardness or springiness but the vegetable breads were up to 25% less cohesive, less gummy and less chewy than the commercial breads. Questionnaires and Likert scale (150 mm) responses were completed by 50 physically active volunteers aged 50+ years. Overall liking of the VB75 and VB100 was rated 40% higher than the white and wheatmeal breads. Vegetable-enriched breads were rated as almost 50% easier to chew (mean ± SD; WB 70.53 ± 39.46 mm, WMB 77.68 ± 33.13 mm, VB75 104.78 ± 30.69 mm, VB100 107.58 ± 24.90 mm) and swallow (WB 70.29 ± 37.98 mm, WMB 77.53 ± 34.88 mm, VB75 104.63 ± 28.25 mm, VB100 104.90 ± 25.54 mm). Vegetable-enriched breads compared to white and wheatmeal breads were instrumentally and subjectively less gummy, cohesive and chewy than commercial breads and have the potential to both improve nutrition and “ease of swallowing” in older people. New areas of research should explore other underutilized vegetables for bread enrichment and their ability to aid swallowing and improve nutrition status.</jats:p