Food neophobia and mealtime food consumption in 4-5 year old children.

Background: Previous research has documented a negative association between maternal report of child food neophobia and reported frequency of consumption of fruit, vegetables, and meat. This study aimed to establish whether neophobia is associated with lower intake of these food types in naturalistic mealtime situations. Methods: One hundred and nine parents of 4–5 year olds completed questionnaires which included a six-item version of the Child Food Neophobia Scale (CFNS). The children took part in a series of 3 test lunch meals at weekly intervals at school at which they were presented with: chicken, cheese, bread, cheese crackers, chocolate biscuits, grapes and tomatoes or carrot sticks. Food items served to each child were weighed before and after the meal to assess total intake of items in four categories: Fruit and vegetables, Protein foods, Starchy foods and Snack foods. Pearson Product Moment Correlations and independent t tests were performed to examine associations between scores on the CFNS and consumption during lunches. Results: Neophobia was associated with lower consumption of fruit and vegetables, protein foods and total calories, but there was no association with intake of starch or snack foods. Conclusion: These results support previous research that has suggested that neophobia impacts differentially on consumption of different food types. Specifically it appears that children who score highly on the CFNS eat less fruit, vegetables and protein foods than their less neophobic peers. Attempts to increase intake of fruit, vegetables and protein might usefully incorporate strategies known to reduce the neophobic response

C.S. Lewis: An Appraisal

An appreciation of Lewis’s work as an author of scholarly, fantastic, theological, and philosophical works

Parental feeding style and childhood obesity.

This thesis examines the association between parental feeding and children's eating behaviour and adiposity. Past research is inconsistent, with some studies finding that higher parental control is associated with adverse effects in terms of unhealthy food choices, disordered intake regulation and obesity, and others indicating positive effects. Discrepancies may relate to variability in parental control measures, sample characteristics and research methods. Study 1 examined the factor structure of two existing measures of parental feeding in 190 parents of 3-5 year olds, and Study 2 added interview and diary data in a sub-sample of these parents. Several distinct dimensions of parental control emerged and a wide range of motivations underlying feeding practices was apparent. In Studies 3 and 4, control was assessed using an improved measure in a socio-economically diverse sample of 541 parents. Pressuring to eat and instrumental feeding were more common in lower socio-economic (SES) parents, while restriction was more frequent with higher SES. Child adiposity was unassociated with restriction or instrumental feeding but negatively associated with pressure to eat. This relationship could be partly explained by parents' putting more pressure on thinner children with less appetite for food, although other explanations also fit the data. Study 5 added to the longitudinal literature on parental control, finding a negative prospective association between pressure to eat and weight gain from 4 to 7 years. Study 6 assessed regulation of intake over a two-part meal in a sample of 4-5 year olds, and found some evidence for a negative association between regulation and parental monitoring. Study 7 showed that children with slower eating rates and lower meal intakes had parents who exerted more pressure to eat, but found negligible associations between parental feeding and eating without hunger. The importance of these findings for understanding how parents influence children's weight is discussed

Ransom in \u3ci\u3ePerelandra\u3c/i\u3e: Jungian Hero?

Sees Ransom’s character development in Perelandra as a classic case of Jungian individuation by undergoing the aspects of Campbell’s “monomyth.” Sees some affinities between Jung’s theory of personality and Lewis’s Christianity

Medical Countermeasures for Radiation Induced Health Effects: Reports of an Interagency Panel Session Held at the NASA Human Research Program Investigator's Workshop, January 26, 2017

An Interagency Panel Session organized by the NASA Human Research Program Space Radiation Program Element (SRPE) was held during the NASA Human Research Program (HRP) Investigators Workshop (IWS) in Galveston, Texas on January 26, 2017 to identify complementary research areas that will advance the testing and development of medical countermeasures (MCM) in support of radioprotection and radiation mitigation on the ground and in space. There were several areas of common interest identified among the various participating agencies. This report provides a summary of the topics discussed by each agency along with potential areas of intersection for mutual collaboration opportunities. Common goals included repurposing of pharmaceuticals, neutraceuticals for use as radioprotectors and/or mitigators, low-dose/chronic exposure paradigms, late effects post-radiation exposure, mixed-field exposures of gamma-neutron, performance decrements, and methods to determine individual exposure levels

Programmatic correlates of maternal healthcare seeking behaviors in Ethiopia

Background: Considerable improvement in maternal healthcare use has been observed since the inception of the health extension program (HEP) in Ethiopia in 2003.Objective: This paper evaluates the influence of HEP outreach strategies on maternal healthcare use.Method: Cross-sectional survey of 2,916 women with children 0 to 11 months from Amhara, Oromiya, Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s, and Tigray regions, obtained between December 2008 and January 2009, were analyzed using regression models to assess the impacts of HEP strategies on maternal health outcomes.Result: The analyses found that communities (i.e., kebeles) with relatively high prevalence of model families, higher rate of household visits by health extension workers, and higher rate of household visits by voluntary community health workers were associated with improved antenatal care use, tetanus toxoid vaccination coverage, and receiving postnatal care visits; but the strategies were not associated with deliveries attended by health professionals.Conclusion: Although the impacts of HEP strategies on maternal healthcare use were statistically significant, they were not optimum to reach the maternal mortality reduction targets of the government of Ethiopia. The HEP needs to review and strengthen its community based strategies in order to reach its goals. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2010;24 Special Issue 1:92-99

SiaA/D interconnects c-di-GMP and RsmA signaling to coordinate cellular aggregation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in response to environmental conditions

© 2016 Colley, Dederer, Carnell, Kjelleberg, Rice and Klebensberger. Pseudomonas aeruginosa has emerged as an important opportunistic human pathogen that is often highly resistant to eradication strategies, mediated in part by the formation of multicellular aggregates. Cellular aggregates may occur attached to a surface (biofilm), at the air-liquid interface (pellicle), or as suspended aggregates. Compared to surface attached communities, knowledge about the regulatory processes involved in the formation of suspended cell aggregates is still limited. We have recently described the SiaA/D signal transduction module that regulates macroscopic cell aggregation during growth with, or in the presence of the surfactant SDS. Targets for SiaA/D mediated regulation include the Psl polysaccharide, the CdrAB two-partner secretion system and the CupA fimbriae. While the global regulators c-di-GMP and RsmA are known to inversely coordinate cell aggregation and regulate the expression of several adhesins, their potential impact on the expression of the cupA operon remains unknown. Here, we investigated the function of SiaA (a putative ser/thr phosphatase) and SiaD (a di-guanylate cyclase) in cupA1 expression using transcriptional reporter fusions and qRT-PCR. These studies revealed a novel interaction between the RsmA posttranscriptional regulatory system and SiaA/D mediated macroscopic aggregation. The RsmA/rsmY/Z system was found to affect macroscopic aggregate formation in the presence of surfactant by impacting the stability of the cupA1 mRNA transcript and we reveal that RsmA directly binds to the cupA1 leader sequence in vitro. We further identified that transcription of the RsmA antagonist rsmZ is controlled in a SiaA/D dependent manner during growth with SDS. Finally, we found that the siaD transcript is also under regulatory control of RsmA and that overproduction of RsmA or the deletion of siaD results in decreased cellular cyclic di-guanosine monophosphate (c-di-GMP) levels quantified by a transcriptional reporter, demonstrating that SiaA/D connects c-di-GMP and RsmA/rsmY/Z signaling to reciprocally regulate cell aggregation in response to environmental conditions

Responding to the maternal health care challenge: The Ethiopian Health Extension Program

Background: Responding to challenges in achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDG), the Ethiopian government initiated the Health Extension Program in 2003 as part of the Health Sector Development Program (HSDP) to improve equitable access to preventive, promotive and select curative health interventions through paid community level health extension workers.Objective: To explore Ethiopia’s progress toward achieving MDG 5 that focuses on improved maternal health through the Health Extension Program.Methods: This paper reviews available survey data and literature to determine the feasibility of reaching the targets specified for MDG 5 and for HSDP.Important findings: Achieving the set targets is a daunting task despite reaching the physical targets of two health extension workers per kebele. The 2015 MDG target for the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) is 218 while the 2005 MMR estimate is 673. The HSDP target is 32% skilled birth attendant use by 2010 but only about 12% use was found in the four most populated regions of the country in 2009.Conclusions: Accelerating progress towards these targets is possible through the Health Extension Program at the worker level through improved promotion of family planning and specific maternal interventions, such as misoprostol for active management of third stage of labor, immediate postpartum visits, and improved coordination from community to referral level. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2010;24 Special Issue 1:105-109

Icelandic political brand personalities

Political branding research remains under-researched, particularly the internal orientation and intentional, desired positioning otherwise known as political brand identity. Existing studies that have tended to focus on the identity of 'party' political brands rather than that of politicians. Further, framing politicians as 'personal brands' allows us to explore the manifestations of intended identities, combined of personal characteristics such as personality traits, experiences feelings, beliefs and personal values, which up until now remained an under-developed research area. In this study, we explore the creation and management of personal political brand identity particularly from the perspective of the brand's creators. Further, this is achieved by bridging two streams of commercial branding theory such as personal branding and brand identity. More specifically, this study investigates the creation and management of personal political brand identity by building on the six-staged personal brand auditing framework (Philbrick and Cleveland 2015) to examine the personal political brand identities of politicians from an internal brand-creator perspective. Members of Parliament from the Republic of Iceland contextualises this study. The reason for this is twofold. Icelandic politics faced a succession of financial scandals, which has meant general elections have taken place in 2013, 2016 and 2017 instead of every four years. In addition, the last Icelandic general election witnessed an influx of new parliamentarians each possessing distinct identities and positions. Therefore, up to half of the Icelandic Parliament is represented by newly elected personal political brands. This qualitative case-study approach reveals how personal political brands create, construct and communicate their identity. This research adopted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Members of the Icelandic Parliament. In addition, as part of the case study analysis, public websites and public social media sites were analysed to help better understand the topic. This study adopted a two-staged thematic approach to analyse the key findings identifying common themes and patterns. This study reveals that the personal brand identities of members of the Icelandic Parliament represented a clear brand mantra and created-managed via personal values and ideology and based on key issues that were personal to the individual. In addition, this study highlighted that personal brand identities were developed with offline and online touchpoints with the aim of communicating an aligned, clear and authentic political brand in the mind of Icelandic citizens. However, this study also revealed the challenges of managing an integrated, authentic personal brand identity given the problematic nature of the party-coalition political system. Our paper builds on the six-staged analytical process of personal branding and proposes the Personal Political Brand Identity Framework as an operational tool to introspectively evaluate personal political brand identity. This framework can be used by political actors across different settings and contexts to assess personal political brands from multiple perspectives. This in turn will address the explicit calls for further research on the internal perspective of political brands, which in turn will extend an under-developed area of political branding

Behavioural susceptibility theory: the role of appetite in genetic susceptibility to obesity in early life

Excess weight gained during the early years and, in particular, rapid weight gain in the first 2 years of life, are a major risk factors for adult obesity. The growing consensus is that childhood obesity develops from a complex interaction between genetic susceptibility and exposure to an 'obesogenic' environment. Behavioural susceptibility theory (BST) was developed to explain the nature of this gene-environment interaction, and why the 'obesogenic' environment does not affect all children equally. It hypothesizes that inherited variation in appetite, which is present from birth, determines why some infants and children overeat, and others do not, in response to environmental opportunity. That is, those who inherit genetic variants promoting an avid appetite are vulnerable to overeating and developing obesity, while those who are genetically predisposed to have a smaller appetite and lower interest in food are protected from obesity-or even at risk of being underweight. We review the breadth of research to-date that has contributed to the evidence base for BST, focusing on early life, and discuss implications and future directions for research and theory. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Causes of obesity: theories, conjectures and evidence (Part I)'