Nudging using the ‘dish of the day’ strategy does not work for plant-based meals in a Danish sample of adolescent and older people

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Adequate nutrition is an important factor for health and well-being in adolescents and later years. Fruits and vegetables are part of a healthy diet as important source of nutrients, but their intakes are lower than the recommendations in European countries. This study aimed to compare the choices made by adolescents and older people between three similar dishes, one based on meat, one on fish and one on vegetables, in two different conditions: a neutral (control) situation and an intervention situation in which the vegetable-based meal was designated ‘dish of the day’. The comparisons of choices will be made within the same age group (adolescents in the control group vs. adolescents in the intervention group; older people in the control group vs. older people in the intervention group). A quasi-randomised field trial design was used with a sample of 94 adolescents (aged 10–19 years) and 97 older people (aged ≥65 years), who were randomly allocated to intervention or control groups. In the control situation participants were asked to choose between three similar meals, one meat, one fish and one the VeggiEat dish. In the intervention, the VeggiEat dish was labelled the ‘Dish of the day’. All dishes were provided free of charge, displayed side by side in the same order and served in same portions. The dish choices showed no differences between the control and intervention groups in both age groups, and no differences were found among the other variables analysed. This nudging strategy, ‘dish of the day’, seems not to work for the Danish sample of adolescents and older people. Future nudging studies with these populations are needed in order to find the best strategy to move adolescents' and older people's food habits toward a healthier pattern

Avaliação do incremento em volume de madeira de Quassia amara L.- Simaroubaceae, em cultivo agroecológico no trópico úmido da Costa Rica.

Quassia amara é arbusto de 3 a 6 metros de altura, tendo sido retirado indiscriminadamente das florestas para extrair do caule as quassinas usadas na indústria farmacêutica e como inseticida em agricultura orgânica. Não se tem muita informação técnica acerca do crescimento desta espécie para subsidiar estratégias de manejo sustentado. Este trabalho tem como objetivo avaliar o crescimento de Q. amara L. em cultivo agroecológico na Costa Rica. O trabalho consistiu em realizar avaliações do desenvolvimento de indivíduos de Q. amara em parcelas permanentes de medições, instaladas em meio às plantações desta espécie em consórcio com essências arbóreas. Foram efetuadas medições de diâmetro do caule a 10 cm do solo e altura total. Foi observado que em função das taxas de crescimento vegetal e incrementos médio e corrente anuais (IMA e ICA), mesmo após cinco anos de plantio, a madeira de Quassia amara para extração de quassinas não está pronta para colheita

Impact of a nudging intervention and factors associated with vegetable dish choice among European adolescents.

PURPOSE: To test the impact of a nudge strategy (dish of the day strategy) and the factors associated with vegetable dish choice, upon food selection by European adolescents in a real foodservice setting. METHODS: A cross-sectional quasi-experimental study was implemented in restaurants in four European countries: Denmark, France, Italy and United Kingdom. In total, 360 individuals aged 12-19 years were allocated into control or intervention groups, and asked to select from meat-based, fish-based, or vegetable-based meals. All three dishes were identically presented in appearance (balls with similar size and weight) and with the same sauce (tomato sauce) and side dishes (pasta and salad). In the intervention condition, the vegetable-based option was presented as the "dish of the day" and numbers of dishes chosen by each group were compared using the Pearson chi-square test. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was run to assess associations between choice of vegetable-based dish and its potential associated factors (adherence to Mediterranean diet, food neophobia, attitudes towards nudging for vegetables, food choice questionnaire, human values scale, social norms and self-estimated health, country, gender and belonging to control or intervention groups). All analyses were run in SPSS 22.0. RESULTS: The nudging strategy (dish of the day) did not show a difference on the choice of the vegetable-based option among adolescents tested (p = 0.80 for Denmark and France and p = 0.69 and p = 0.53 for Italy and UK, respectively). However, natural dimension of food choice questionnaire, social norms and attitudes towards vegetable nudging were all positively associated with the choice of the vegetable-based dish. Being male was negatively associated with choosing the vegetable-based dish. CONCLUSIONS: The "dish of the day" strategy did not work under the study conditions. Choice of the vegetable-based dish was predicted by natural dimension, social norms, gender and attitudes towards vegetable nudging. An understanding of factors related to choosing vegetable based dishes is necessary for the development and implementation of public policy interventions aiming to increase the consumption of vegetables among adolescents

Metastable States in Spin Glasses and Disordered Ferromagnets

We study analytically M-spin-flip stable states in disordered short-ranged Ising models (spin glasses and ferromagnets) in all dimensions and for all M. Our approach is primarily dynamical and is based on the convergence of a zero-temperature dynamical process with flips of lattice animals up to size M and starting from a deep quench, to a metastable limit. The results (rigorous and nonrigorous, in infinite and finite volumes) concern many aspects of metastable states: their numbers, basins of attraction, energy densities, overlaps, remanent magnetizations and relations to thermodynamic states. For example, we show that their overlap distribution is a delta-function at zero. We also define a dynamics for M=infinity, which provides a potential tool for investigating ground state structure.Comment: 34 pages (LaTeX); to appear in Physical Review

The design and evaluation of travelling gun irrigation systems: enrolador software

Technical Paperinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio