Rural Adults’ Perspectives on School Food in a North Carolina County

IntroductionTo address alarming rates of youth obesity, multiple stakeholder perspectives must be understood and considered when developing nutrition interventions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine adults’ perceptions of school food in rural North Carolina and their opinions about potential changes to encourage students to eat more fruits and vegetables in school meals.MethodsWe conducted semistructured key informant interviews by telephone from February through March 2013 to determine adult opinions regarding elementary school food and child health. Participants included parents, teachers, school administrators, and a cafeteria staff member. Interview transcripts were thematically analyzed using Dedoose qualitative analysis software.ResultsFour themes emerged from key informant interviews regarding school meals and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption: 1) schools are an appropriate place for nutritious food, 2) current school food is bland and unappealing, 3) school cafeterias can use simple strategies to increase fruit and vegetable intake, and 4) federal school meal guidelines are perceived as barriers to increased fruit and vegetable intake during school meals.ConclusionStudy findings suggest that training and support for cafeteria staff on healthy food preparation and presentation are critical and that there should be a “meeting in the middle” between child appeal and health. Nutritious and appealing school food options may have the potential to greatly increase fruit and vegetable consumption in rural elementary schools in North Carolina

Social support for physical activity—role of Facebook with and without structured intervention

Despite their widespread use and extensive technical features, little is known about how to use online social networking sites to increase physical activity. This study aims to examine Facebook engagement among participants in the online social networking arm of a randomized controlled physical activity promotion trial (n = 67). Facebook communications were double coded and analyzed using ATLAS.ti. Regression procedures were used to determine predictors of Facebook use and associations between types of use and changes in perceived social support and physical activity. Changes in perceived social support and physical activity were more strongly associated with participants' individual Facebook use than use of the Facebook intervention group. The way social media sites are used in intervention design could have an impact on their effects. Including existing friends in interventions and using applications that incorporate intervention activities into a more naturalistic use of Facebook may improve the efficacy of future interventions

Epigenetics and developmental programming of welfare and production traits in farm animals

The concept that postnatal health and development can be influenced by events that occur in utero originated from epidemiological studies in humans supported by numerous mechanistic (including epigenetic) studies in a variety of model species. Referred to as the ‘developmental origins of health and disease’ or ‘DOHaD’ hypothesis, the primary focus of large-animal studies until quite recently had been biomedical. Attention has since turned towards traits of commercial importance in farm animals. Herein we review the evidence that prenatal risk factors, including suboptimal parental nutrition, gestational stress, exposure to environmental chemicals and advanced breeding technologies, can determine traits such as postnatal growth, feed efficiency, milk yield, carcass composition, animal welfare and reproductive potential. We consider the role of epigenetic and cytoplasmic mechanisms of inheritance, and discuss implications for livestock production and future research endeavours. We conclude that although the concept is proven for several traits, issues relating to effect size, and hence commercial importance, remain. Studies have also invariably been conducted under controlled experimental conditions, frequently assessing single risk factors, thereby limiting their translational value for livestock production. We propose concerted international research efforts that consider multiple, concurrent stressors to better represent effects of contemporary animal production systems

Sympathetic involvement in time-constrained sequential foraging

Appraising sequential offers relative to an unknown future opportunity and a time cost requires an optimization policy that draws on a learned estimate of an environment’s richness. Converging evidence points to a learning asymmetry, whereby estimates of this richness update with a bias toward integrating positive information. We replicate this bias in a sequential foraging (prey selection) task and probe associated activation within the sympathetic branch of the autonomic system, using trial-by-trial measures of simultaneously recorded cardiac autonomic physiology. We reveal a unique adaptive role for the sympathetic branch in learning. It was specifically associated with adaptation to a deteriorating environment: it correlated with both the rate of negative information integration in belief estimates and downward changes in moment-to-moment environmental richness, and was predictive of optimal performance on the task. The findings are consistent with a framework whereby autonomic function supports the learning demands of prey selection