AI-enabled wearable cameras for assisting dietary assessment in African populations.

We have developed a population-level method for dietary assessment using low-cost wearable cameras. Our approach, EgoDiet, employs an egocentric vision-based pipeline to learn portion sizes, addressing the shortcomings of traditional self-reported dietary methods. To evaluate the functionality of this method, field studies were conducted in London (Study A) and Ghana (Study B) among populations of Ghanaian and Kenyan origin.

Regional fire-greening positive feedback loops in Alaskan Arctic tundra.

Arctic tundra has experienced rapid warming, outpacing global averages, leading to significant greening whose primary drivers include widespread shrubification. Here we confirm that a fire-greening positive feedback loop is evident across the Alaskan tundra, and evidence suggests that this feedback loop is dominated by the fire-shrub interactions. We show that tundra wildfires, especially those with higher severity, play a critical role in boosting the overall greening of the tundra, often by enhancing upright deciduous shrub growth or establishment but sometimes by inducing increases in other vascular biomass.

Supply- and demand-side drivers of the change in the sugar density of food purchased between 2015 and 2018 in Great Britain.

The UK government launched a two-component sugar-reduction programme in 2016, one component is the taxation of sugar-sweetened beverages, the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, and the second is a voluntary sugar reduction programme for products contributing most to children's sugar intakes. These policies provided incentives both for industry to change the products they sell and for people to change their food and beverage choices through a 'signalling' effect that has raised awareness of excess sugar intakes in the population. In this study, we aimed to identify the relative contributions of the supply- and demand-side drivers of changes in the sugar density of food and beverages purchased in Great Britain.

The role of nutrient sensing dysregulation in anorexia of ageing: The little we know and the much we don't.

The age-related decline in appetite and food intake - termed "anorexia of ageing" - is implicated in undernutrition in later life and hence provides a public health challenge for our ageing population. Eating behaviour is controlled, in part, by homeostatic mechanisms which sense nutrient status and provide feedback to appetite control regions of the brain. Such feedback signals, propagated by episodic gut hormones, are dysregulated in some older adults.