Publications by authors named "B McGill"
Article Synopsis
- - Flavored oral nicotine pouches, marketed by global tobacco companies like PMI and British American Tobacco, entered Australia in 2024 despite being illegal for local retailers to sell, raising concerns about their promotion by social media influencers to youth.
- - The Australian Federal Government is worried about the growing awareness of these nicotine pouches as unproven tools for quitting smoking or vaping, but no research had been published about their impact in Australia at the time of the study.
- - Focus group discussions revealed that young users are increasingly attracted to nicotine pouches for reasons such as enhancing sports performance, quitting vaping, and socializing, with some considering them a 'healthier' alternative to traditional smoking, highlighting the urgent need for research to inform
E-cigarette use (or vaping) is widespread in young people and is a rapidly growing public health problem. While the tobacco and vaping industry has promoted vaping as a smoking cessation aid for adults, the industry has strategically targeted young people through marketing and appealing designs to orientate a new generation of consumers to use their products. These strategies are not new and replicate what we have previously seen employed by the tobacco industry in past decades to maintain and grow their tobacco profits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLeaf economic spectrum (LES) relationships have been studied across many different plant lineages and at different organizational scales. However, the temporal stability of the LES relationships is largely unknown. We used the wild blueberry system with high genotypic diversity to test whether trait-trait relationships across genotypes demonstrate the same LES relationships found in the global database (GLOPNET) and whether they are stable across years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Farmers are changing the crops they grow to adapt to new environmental and market conditions, which is called crop switching.
- This study looks at how often and where crop switching happens in the United States using detailed data from 2008 to 2022.
- They found that crop switching is more common in diverse and less farmed areas but less common in highly uniform farming regions, showing that farmers’ choices depend on different factors across the country.
Objective: To explore population-level trends in health behaviours and wellbeing indicators from before (2017-2019) to during (2020-2022) the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.
Methods: Using cross-sectional data from New South Wales Adult Population Health Surveys (2017-2022, n = 73,680 responses), we calculated weighted prevalence estimates and interrupted time-series logit models to investigate trends in health behavioural risk factors (vegetable and fruit intake, physical activity, alcohol consumption, smoking, e-cigarette use), Body Mass Index (BMI) (overweight and obesity), and wellbeing indicators (psychological distress, self-rated health) among adults aged ≥ 16 years before and during the pandemic.
Results: From 2017 to 2022, the behavioural risk factors and BMI trends were mostly unchanged.