Students choosing fat-free chocolate milk during school lunch consume more calories, total sugar, protein, minerals and vitamins at lunch.

Objective: To examine how milk consumption varies by milk choice and measure the association of milk choice on the nutritional and energetic content of National School Lunch Program (NSLP) lunches.

Design: An observational plate waste study using the Digital Photography of Foods Method.

Setting: Data were collected from two suburban South Carolina schools in one district during February and March 2013.

Selection and consumption of lunches by National School Lunch Program participants.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 requires schools participating in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to offer a variety of healthy food options each day. Using digital photography data collected from two suburban elementary schools in the spring of 2013, we examine NSLP participant's selection and consumption of all five NSLP lunch components ((1) milk, (2) vegetable, (3) fruit, (4) meat/meat alternate (MA), and (5) grain). We use logit regressions to analyze the selection of the various lunch components by race/ethnicity, gender, grade, and household income level.

Neighborhood environments and self-rated health in Mainland China, Japan and South Korea.

Neighborhood environments are considered crucial determinants of self-rated health. Previous research has documented a positive association between the quality of neighborhood environments and health status. However, the relationship between neighborhood environments and health status in East Asian countries has received far less attention.

How and why weight stigma drives the obesity 'epidemic' and harms health.

Background: In an era when obesity prevalence is high throughout much of the world, there is a correspondingly pervasive and strong culture of weight stigma. For example, representative studies show that some forms of weight discrimination are more prevalent even than discrimination based on race or ethnicity.

Discussion: In this Opinion article, we review compelling evidence that weight stigma is harmful to health, over and above objective body mass index.

The Role of Body Size in Mate Selection among African American Young Adults.

A profusion of studies have demonstrated that body size is a major factor in mate selection for both men and women. The particular role played by weight, however, has been subject to some debate, particularly with respect to the types of body sizes deemed most attractive, and scholars have questioned the degree to which body size preferences are constant across groups. In this paper, we drew from two perspectives on this issue, Sexual Strategies Theory and what we termed the cultural variability perspective, and used survey data to examine how body size was associated with both casual dating and serious romantic relationships.

Exploring the impact of skin tone on family dynamics and race-related outcomes.

Racism has historically been a primary source of discrimination against African Americans, but there has been little research on the role that skin tone plays in explaining experiences with racism. Similarly, colorism within African American families and the ways in which skin tone influences family processes is an understudied area of research. Using data from a longitudinal sample of African American families (n = 767), we assessed whether skin tone impacted experiences with discrimination or was related to differences in quality of parenting and racial socialization within families.

Body Size and Social Self-Image among Adolescent African American Girls: The Moderating Influence of Family Racial Socialization.

Social psychologists have amassed a large body of work demonstrating that overweight African American adolescent girls have generally positive self-images, particularly when compared with overweight females from other racial and ethnic groups. Some scholars have proposed that elements of African American social experience may contribute to the maintenance of these positive self-views. In this paper, we evaluate these arguments using data drawn from a panel study of socio-economically diverse African American adolescent girls living in Iowa and Georgia.

The Relationship between Body Size and Depressed Mood: Findings from a Sample of African American Middle School Girls.

The relationship between body weight and depression among adolescent females has been the subject of considerable attention from researchers. The risk of experiencing this distress, however, is not equally distributed across members of all racial groups. African American girls are generally more satisfied with their bodies and thus may be less vulnerable to experiencing depression as a result of weight concerns.