Young children’s food brand knowledge. Early development and associations with television viewing and parent’s diet

Brand knowledge is a prerequisite of children’s requests and choices for branded foods. We explored the development of young children’s brand knowledge of foods highly advertised on television – both healthy and less healthy. Participants were 172 children aged 3–5 years in diverse socio-economic settings, from two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland with different regulatory environments. Results indicated that food brand knowledge (i) did not differ across jurisdictions; (ii) increased significantly between 3 and 4 years; and (iii) children had significantly greater knowledge of unhealthy food brands, compared with similarly advertised healthy brands. In addition, (iv) children’s healthy food brand knowledge was not related to their television viewing, their mother’s education, or parent or child eating. However, (v) unhealthy brand knowledge was significantly related to all these factors, although only parent eating and children’s age were independent predictors. Findings indicate that effects of food marketing for un- healthy foods take place through routes other than television advertising alone, and are present before pre-schoolers develop the concept of healthy eating. Implications are that marketing restrictions of un- healthy foods should extend beyond television advertising; and that family-focused obesity prevention programmes should begin before children are 3 years of age

EFSA BIOHAZ Panel (EFSA Panel on Biological Hazards), 2013. Scientific Opinion on the public health hazards to be covered by inspection of meat (bovine animals).

A risk ranking process identified Salmonella spp. and pathogenic verocytotoxin-producing Escherichia coli (VTEC) as current high-priority biological hazards for meat inspection of bovine animals. As these hazards are not detected by traditional meat inspection, a meat safety assurance system for the farm-to-chilled carcass continuum using a risk-based approach was proposed. Key elements of the system are risk-categorisation of slaughter animals for high-priority biological hazards based on improved food chain information, as well as risk-categorisation of slaughterhouses according to their capability to control those hazards. Omission of palpation and incision during post-mortem inspection for animals subjected to routine slaughter may decrease spreading and cross-contamination with the high-priority biological hazards. For chemical hazards, dioxins and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls were ranked as being of high potential concern; all other substances were ranked as of medium or lower concern. Monitoring programmes for chemical hazards should be more flexible and based on the risk of occurrence, taking into account the completeness and quality of the food chain information supplied and the ranking of chemical substances, which should be regularly updated to include new hazards. Control programmes across the food chain, national residue control programmes, feed control and monitoring of environmental contaminants should be better integrated. Meat inspection is a valuable tool for surveillance and monitoring of animal health and welfare conditions. Omission of palpation and incision would reduce detection effectiveness for bovine tuberculosis and would have a negative impact on the overall surveillance system especially in officially tuberculosis free countries. The detection effectiveness for bovine cysticercosis, already low with the current meat inspection system, would result in a further decrease, if palpation and incision are removed. Extended use of food chain information could compensate for some, but not all, the information on animal health and welfare lost if only visual post-mortem inspection is applied

The Promotion Strategy of Kindergartens in Middle Taiwan

[[abstract]]Preschool education is the foundation of all educations. Quality is more important than quantity in breeding children. The purposes of this paper are: 1. assessing the developing position and current problems of kindergarten; 2. weighting preferences for different alternatives via questionnaire survey and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP); 3. evaluating the internal effects and external effects of promotion strategy on current householders and potential householders of public and private kindergarten in middle Taiwan; 4. drawing some improvements of promotion strategy for kindergartens based on empirical results. There are 4 Administrative divisions in Middle Taiwan: Taichung county, Taichung city, Changhua County, Nantou County. To assess internal information, 77 samples of 487 public and private kindergartens are collected in weighting promotion strategy via AHP. To assess external information, 697 samples of current households and 362 samples of potential households are surveyed. There are five measures of promotion strategy, such as advertising, sales force, sales promotion, public relations, and direct mail and others. The ranking based on the AHP results of promotion strategy are public relation 0.339, direct mail and others 0.208, sales force 0.183, sales promotion 0.158, and advertising 0.113, respectively. ?Superior Assessment? of public relation is first priority promotion strategy among 25 alternatives, while ?Superior child-care worker? of direct mail and others is the second priority, ?Professional license? of public relation is the third

Mass media influence and the regulation of illegal practices in the seafood market

Following media exposure on the issue of seafood mislabeling in Ireland, results of repeated forensic testing of cod product labeling suggest that media attention played an important role in determining significant improvements in the supermarket retail sector, but had no detectable effect on “take-away” food services. Differences in the chains of production and in compliance requirements to European labeling laws may explain the divergent responses of the two sectors. The findings from this study indicate that it may be possible for mass media to occupy an influential role in fisheries and environmental management and policy, provided that (i) primary research findings are correctly reported by popular media and (ii) governmental agencies follow up the short-term reaction to media exposure with appropriate enforcement measures