Effectiveness and Feasibility of In-office versus Smartphone Text-delivered Nutrition Education in the College Setting: A Mixed-methods Pilot Study

Often, being away from home for the first time, coupled with limited knowledge regarding healthy eating behaviors, leads to poor food choices and an increased risk of obesity among college-aged young adults. These college students are prone to high-calorie diets and limited physical activity, putting them at risk for obesity, a physiologically, psychologically, and financially costly epidemic in the United States. College students use their cellular phones over eight and a half hours a day and cell phones are their primary means of information consumption outside of the classroom, suggesting that the phones would be a useful tool to provide nutrition education to this at-risk population. This mixed-methods randomized-controlled trial took place over eight weeks, between 9/15/15 and 12/2/15. The primary aims of this study were to assess the effectiveness and feasibility between an educational nutrition intervention delivered via smartphone texts and a traditional in-office setting for 18-22-year-old, overweight college students at the Sonoma State University Student Health Center. Using simple randomization, participants were assigned to one of two groups: text, or in-office. Participants in the in-office group received one-on-one nutrition counseling framed within the social cognitive theory by a registered nurse at the study onset, week two, and week four. Participants in the text group received the same information, broken up into weekly text messages with links to websites, YouTube, and explanations of content. Participant characteristics, including weight, height, and health behaviors (hours of sleep a night, number of fruits and vegetables per day), were assessed at the study onset (T1) and again at week two (T2), week four (T3), and week eight (T4). All participants were invited to take part in an in-depth, qualitative, face-to-face interview at the end of the study (T4). Nine participants completed both the trial and interviews. Two-thirds (66.7%, n=6) were in the text group, 66.7% (n=6) were female, 33.3% (n=3) were minorities, 66.7% lived on- campus, and 44.4% (n=4) took part in the university’s on-campus meal plan. No statistically significant differences were noted in participant characteristics, or health behaviors between the two groups throughout the study. Although no statistical significance was noted between the two groups with regard to weight change, the text group’s mean weight decreased from 188.25(sd=25.03) pounds to 184.58(sd=24.67) pounds while the in-office group’s mean weight increased from 254.00(sd=90.15) to 257.00(sd=94.14) pounds. Weight loss in the text group should be further evaluated as it may hold clinical significance for effectiveness of the intervention. Through qualitative interviews exploring participants’ experiences, four major themes emerged. All participants in the text group (n=6) stated that they felt there was a need for their method of education, they felt their method was effective, they would recommend their method, and their health behaviors changed positively. For the in-office group, all participants (n=3) said there was a need for their method of education, 67% (n=2) said it was effective, all would recommend it, and 67% stated that they changed their behaviors. Both the quantitative and qualitative findings of this study hold clinical significance as to the effectiveness and feasibility of text messages as a means of providing nutrition education in the college setting. Future research with larger sample sizes and a longer-term study are recommended for more statistical power and to determine the long-term benefits of these methods of nutrition education

Book Review: Introduction to Commercial Transactions (1977)

Book review of INTRODUCTION TO COMMERCIAL TRANSACTIONS, by Robert Braucher & Robert A. Riegert (NY: The Foundation Press, 1977)

The intergenerational transmission of diet culture : a model of children's disordered eating and body image

Eating disorder prevention efforts are needed. When considering prevention, three common and concerning precursors to eating disorder development must be addressed: diet culture, disordered eating behavior, and body image (Harrison, 2019; Levine and Piran, 2004; Levine and Smolak, 2021; Rohde et al., 2015; Seitz, 2019). Given that family communication can influence children's well-being (Arroyo et al., 2017; Baiocchi-Wagner and Talley, 2013; Jones and Young, 2021), the current study sought to investigate the intergenerational transmission of diet culture. 199 parent-child dyads completed an online survey, and data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results provide support for the transmission of diet culture beliefs from parent to child, suggesting that children's perceptions of parental weight talk may be more meaningful in the transmission of diet culture beliefs than parents' self-reported weight talk. Implications for theory, future research, and prevention efforts are discussed.Includes bibliographical references

Spellbound...?: A hermeneutic response to disillusionment in the contemporary university

Universities occupy an important place in the world’s economies, and the idea and purpose of the university is a question that has historically received considerable attention. In recent years, a state of disillusionment among UK academics has been observed, and attributed in part to a belief that the economic mandate of the contemporary university has become alienated from its academic mission. This thesis aims to further explore and understand this disillusionment in context, through eliciting the experiences and conceptions of teachers, students, and managers—groups that are also, in a sense, alienated from one another—and ‘bringing them into conversation’. The thesis presents a framework of ideas pertaining to disillusionment as a state of mind, including disenchantment as a corresponding state of world and its opposite, enchantment. It uses these concepts to build a theory of disillusionment in the university, drawing on a novel methodology that is informed by philosophical hermeneutics and justified in ethical terms as a responsive vacillation between the modes of understanding and explanation. At the heart of the thesis is a semi-fictional conversation that has been created by weaving together excerpts from transcripts of individual interviews. It is fictional in the sense that the interaction between the individuals is imagined, and truthful in its intention to represent faithfully the histories and experiences of the teachers, students, and senior managers who participated. The aim of this creative act is to present a fusion of real perspectives on the university. Presented alongside the conversation is a commentary that documents the author’s encounter with it as a reader. The commentary highlights tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies as the author perceives them to emerge from the conversation, and links these with the theoretical and methodological issues discussed in previous chapters. The thesis concludes by advancing a theory of (dis)illusionment in the university. Having shown that the idea of the university is replete with contradiction, and as such constitutes an ‘impossible object’, illusionment is proposed as an alternative state of mind (to disillusionment) in which one is able to hold contradictory and/or inconsistent ideas. The specific context of the specialist arts university in which the conversations take place is proposed to be significant, with reference to the tolerance of contradiction demonstrated by the characters in the conversation and the participants whose voices they represent. The thesis offers an original contribution to knowledge that has both methodological and disciplinary aspects. While its methodological approach and framing of findings may not be considered experimental by those undertaking scholarly activity in the type of specialist arts institution in which this research is situated, the playful and imaginative approach to data analysis documented here has not previously been applied to the study of higher education itself. In terms of higher education philosophy and theory, the thesis also makes a novel contribution to an understanding of disillusionment in the university, and some of the practical implications of this

Just Sign Here--It\u27s Only a Formality : Parol Evidence in the Law of Commercial Paper

Part I will argue that certainty is especially important in the law of negotiable instruments, although it does not outweigh all other values. In light of the need for certain rules, this Article will consider the policy choices made by the drafters of the Uniform Commercial Code\u27s Article 3 on Commercial Paper with respect to parol evidence. Part II will examine certain parol evidence that is admissible against even the law\u27s most favored plaintiff, the holder in due course. Part III will focus on the Code\u27s indirect treatment of the most troublesome parol evidence problems, those which arise when the holder is not in due course. Part IV will evaluate two examples of explicit statutory rules which prohibit parol evidence

Checking Some Wellesley Index Attributions by Empirical ‘Internal Evidence’: The Case of Blackie and Burton

Since its inception, the Wellesley Index has been a great resource for scholars wanting to know the identity of the numerous anonymous contributors to the nineteenth-century periodicals. However, when all the available external evidence was exhausted Wellesley attributors began to rely on internal evidence, and some of these attributions are now being queried as unduly speculative. This is the case with the attribution of certain articles in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine to John Stuart Blackie and John Hill Burton, two Scottish contributors in the 1830s and 40s, where the evidence is, as Eileen Curran noted in The Curran Index, often ‘tenuous.’  Developments in computational stylistics over the last thirty years now offer statistical techniques for testing such doubtful attributions. Use of the Burrows Method, based on an author’s relative usage or non-usage of common function words, allows the researcher to isolate an author’s distinctive stylistic traits and to use these to compare his known articles with others of more doubtful provenance and to make informed judgments about the likelihood of his authorship of these. These methods were used to test the authorship of eight articles attributed to Blackie and eight attributed to Burton. The use of function words in the doubtful articles was compared to that in six articles reliably attributed to Blackie and ten reliably attributed to Burton and then to that by contemporaries also writing for other major periodicals. It was found that only four of the Blackie articles tested and two of those by Burton appear to have been correctly attributed in the Wellesley Index

Depletion of Beclin-1 Due to Proteolytic Cleavage by Caspases in the Alzheimer\u27s Disease Brain

The Beclin-1 protein is essential for the initiation of autophagy and recent studies suggest this function may be compromised in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In addition, in vitro studies have supported a loss of function of Beclin-1 due to proteolytic modification by caspases. In the present study we examined whether caspase-cleavage of Beclin-1 occurs in the AD brain by designing a site-directed caspase-cleavage antibody based upon a known cleavage site within the protein at position D149. We confirmed that Beclin-1 is an excellent substrate for caspase-3 and demonstrate cleavage led to the formation of a 35 kDa C-terminal fragment labeled by our novel antibody following Western blot analysis. Application of this antibody termed Beclin-1 caspase-cleavage product antibody or BeclinCCP in frontal cortex tissue sections revealed strong immunolabeling within astrocytes that localized with plaque-regions and along blood vessels in all AD cases examined. In addition, weaker, more variable BeclinCCP labeling was also observed within neurofibrillary tangles that co-localized with the early tau conformational marker, MC-1 as well as the late tangle marker, PHF-1. Collectively, these data support a depletion of Beclin-1 in AD following caspase-cleavage