School food has a major influence on children's diet quality and has the potential to reduce diet inequalities and non-communicable disease risk. Funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership, we have established a UK school food system network. The overarching aim was to build a community to work towards a more health-promoting food and nutrition system in UK schools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany children would benefit from a diet richer in vegetables and fruit. Reluctance to taste new foods is widely recognized as a barrier to healthy dietary variety in children. 'Flavour School' is a programme of 'sensory food education', aiming to increase children's confidence and curiosity in exploring foods and flavours, especially vegetables and fruit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose Of Review: Sepsis-induced inflammatory lung injury includes acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). There are currently no effective treatments for ALI/ARDS, but clinical outcomes could be improved by inhibiting lung injury and/or promoting post-sepsis vascular repair. In this review, we describe studies of endothelial cell metabolic pathways in sepsis-induced ALI/ARDS and vascular repair and identify areas of research that deserve attention in future studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAffordable, accurate, and robust temporal measurement devices are desirable for screening and assessment of radon levels in private homes and workplaces. This research expands upon prior research, using the RadonFTlab RadonEye device through a comparison of multiple samples of this instrument with a laboratory-grade instrument, the Saphymo AlphaGUARD, over a more extensive period than reported previously. Data were collected over 291 d in a poorly ventilated basement space in an occupied building.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many children consume a poor quality diet with only a third of children aged 6-9 years eating vegetables daily. A high quality diet is important for good health in childhood; however, the prevalence of children living with obesity has doubled from 10% to 23% during primary school in the UK. Cooking lessons have the potential to improve diet quality and reduce obesity prevalence in childhood, both of which are associated with improved cardiometabolic outcomes in adulthood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To evaluate the impact of increased availability of healthier options on purchasing of different types of vending snack products sold in English leisure (sports) centres.
Design: An evaluation of an intervention using pre-post methods and interrupted time series analysis. Products within the vending machines were altered over three phases to increase the availability of healthier options, using agreed nutrition criteria - Government Buying Standards for Food and Catering Services (GBSF) for England - as a guide, as well as product availability.
Aging is a major risk factor of high incidence and increased mortality of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Here, we demonstrated that persistent lung injury and high mortality in aged mice after sepsis challenge were attributable to impaired endothelial regeneration and vascular repair. Genetic lineage tracing study showed that endothelial regeneration after sepsis-induced vascular injury was mediated by lung resident endothelial proliferation in young adult mice, whereas this intrinsic regenerative program was impaired in aged mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSetting: The internet is an important source of health information but is unregulated. Little research has focused on the assessment of digital information related to nutrition.
Aim: To develop and validate a novel online quality assessment tool (OQAT) for quality assessment of online nutrition information.
Background: Patients with sepsis-induced acute lung injury (ALI)/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) commonly suffer from severe pulmonary thrombosis, but clinical trials of anti-coagulant therapies in sepsis and ARDS patients have failed. ARDS patients with thrombocytopenia also exhibit increased mortality, and widespread pulmonary thrombosis is often seen in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) ARDS patients.
Methods: Employing different amounts of microbeads to induce various levels of pulmonary thrombosis.
An imbalance in the circulatory and organ-specific renin-angiotensin system (RAS) pathways is associated with age-related dysfunction and disease including cardiovascular burden and more recently Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is currently unclear whether an age-associated imbalance in components of the RAS within the brain precedes the onset of AD or whether a RAS imbalance is associated with the onset of disease pathology and cognitive decline. Angiotensin-converting enzyme-1 (ACE-1) and -2 (ACE-2) protein (ELISA) and enzyme activity (FRET assay), markers of the classical and counter-regulatory RAS axis respectively, and Ang-II and Ang-(1-7) peptide levels (ELISA), were measured in the left cortex across four transgenic AD mouse models of amyloid pathology (5xFAD - 2, 6, and 12 months of age; Apd9 - 3-4, 12, and 18 months of age; Tg2576 - 3-4 and 24 months of age; and PDAPP - 3-4, 7, 11, 15, and 18 months of age) and littermate wild-type (WT) controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Schools provide opportunities to improve the quality of children's diet, whilst reducing inequalities in childhood diet and health. Evidence supports whole school approaches, including consistency in food quality, eating culture and food education. However, such approaches are often poorly implemented due to the highly complex environments in which schools operate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNutrition messages are a central part of policy making as well as communication via product information, advertising, healthcare advice and lifestyle campaigns. However, with amplified information (and misinformation) from a growing number of sources, inconsistent and conflicting food landscapes, and limited engagement from the public, nutrition messaging tensions have become more accentuated than previously. In this review, we focus on the challenges facing those wishing to effect dietary change through communication; and identify opportunities and future research questions Beginning with a new working definition and taxonomy for the term ‘nutrition message’, we consider the evolution of public health nutrition messages from the past century and discuss which types of messages may be more effective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMitigation options to reduce the risk of foreign animal disease entry into the United States may lead to degradation of some vitamins. The objective of Exp. 1 was to determine the impact of 0, 30, 60, or 90 d storage time on water-soluble vitamin (riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, and cobalamin) stability when vitamin premix (VP) and vitamin trace mineral premix (VTM) were blended with 1% inclusion of medium-chain fatty acid (MCFA) (1:1:1 blend of C6:C8:C10) or mineral oil (MO) with different environmental conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCancer patients have a greater risk of thrombosis than individuals without cancer. Conversely, thrombosis is a diagnostic predictor of cancer, but the mechanisms by which thrombosis promotes tumor propagation are incompletely understood. Our previous studies showed that hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF) 1α and HIF2α are stabilized in myeloid cells of murine thrombi.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many children would benefit from a diet richer in vegetables and fruit. 'Flavour School' is a programme of 'sensory food education', which aims to increase children's confidence and curiosity in exploring foods and flavours, especially vegetables and fruit. This study will conduct a cluster-randomised controlled trial to assess the outcomes of the Flavour School programme in primary school children aged 4-7 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrials
August 2022
Background: Childhood obesity rates more than double during primary school in England. Acquiring competent cooking skills is a key part of children's education that can lead to improved knowledge of a healthy lifestyle and dietary behaviours. Evaluation of the impact of 'PhunkyFoods', a school-based food and nutrition education programme, will assess food literacy, cooking skills and dietary behaviour in primary-school children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe taste of foods is a key factor for adolescents' food choices and intakes, yet, exploring taste characteristics of adolescents' diet is limited. Using food records for 284 adolescents (10-19 years old) from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), year 9 (2016-2017), we classified diets according to taste. Tastes for each food consumed were generated from a previous survey that asked participants to allocate one main taste to each food.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhole-genome duplication is widespread in plant evolutionary history and is followed by nonrandom gene loss to return to a diploid state. Across multiple angiosperm species, the retained genes tend to be dosage-sensitive regulatory genes such as transcription factors, yet data for younger polyploid species is sparse. Here, we analyzed the retention, expression, and genetic variation in transcription factors in the recent allohexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere are currently no effective treatments for sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The repositioning of existing drugs is one possible effective strategy for the treatment of sepsis and ARDS. We previously showed that vascular repair and the resolution of sepsis-induced inflammatory lung injury is dependent upon endothelial HIF-1α/FoxM1 signaling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a novel case of recurrent brain abscesses found to be the result of a silent congenital right-to-left extracardiac shunt, a persistent left superior vena cava draining into the left atrium. The patient's brain abscess was evacuated surgically and treated with antibiotics, and his shunt was subsequently repaired. The case suggests that attention should be paid to evaluation for shunt physiology allowing for bypass of the pulmonary circulation in those with recurrent brain abscesses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInflammatory lung injury is characterized by lung endothelial cell (LEC) death, alveolar epithelial cell (AEC) death, LEC-LEC junction weakening, and leukocyte infiltration, which together disrupt nutrient and oxygen transport. Subsequently, lung vascular repair is characterized by LEC and AEC regeneration and LEC-LEC junction re-annealing, which restores nutrient and oxygen delivery to the injured tissue. Pulmonary hypoxia is a characteristic feature of several inflammatory lung conditions, including acute lung injury (ALI), acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF