Int J Environ Res Public Health
January 2024
There is mounting concern over the potential harms associated with ultra-processed foods, including poor mental health and antisocial behavior. Cutting-edge research provides an enhanced understanding of biophysiological mechanisms, including microbiome pathways, and invites a historical reexamination of earlier work that investigated the relationship between nutrition and criminal behavior. Here, in this perspective article, we explore how this emergent research casts new light and greater significance on previous key observations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth promotion is conceived as a unifying concept for improving the health of populations. This means addressing the socio-cultural, economic and commercial causes of ill-health, which are necessarily informed by past policies and socio-cultural contexts. However, historical scholarship has rarely figured in health promotion practice or scholarship.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLancet Reg Health West Pac
April 2023
Background: Cancer is a significant problem for the South Pacific region due to a range of complex health challenges. Currently gaps in diagnosis, treatment and palliative care are significant, and while governmental commitment is strong, economic constrains limit health system strengthening. Alliances have been successful in strengthening non-communicable disease and cancer control policy and services in resource constrained settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost public health research on the commercial determinants of health (CDOH) to date has focused on a narrow segment of commercial actors. These actors are generally the transnational corporations producing so-called unhealthy commodities such as tobacco, alcohol, and ultra-processed foods. Furthermore, as public health researchers, we often discuss the CDOH using sweeping terms such as private sector, industry, or business that lump together diverse entities whose only shared characteristic is their engagement in commerce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlanetary health provides a perspective of ecological interdependence that connects the health and vitality of individuals, communities, and Earth's natural systems. It includes the social, political, and economic ecosystems that influence both individuals and whole societies. In an era of interconnected grand challenges threatening health of all systems at all scales, planetary health provides a framework for cross-sectoral collaboration and unified systems approaches to solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAust N Z J Public Health
August 2022
Objective: To explore junior doctors' attitudes towards and experiences of health advocacy practice and teaching in Australia.
Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 junior doctors across Australia. Data were thematically analysed.
Many commercial actors use a range of coordinated and sophisticated strategies to protect business interests-their corporate playbook-but many of these strategies come at the expense of public health. To counter this corporate playbook and advance health and wellbeing, public health actors need to develop, refine, and modernise their own set of strategies, to create a public health playbook. In this Viewpoint, we seek to consolidate thinking around how public health can counter and proactively minimise powerful commercial influences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2021
The "Earthrise" photograph, taken on the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, became one of the most significant images of the 20th Century. It triggered a profound shift in environmental awareness and the potential for human unity-inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970. Taking inspiration from these events 50 years later, we initiated at our 2020 annual conference of VIVO Planetary Health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Ultra-processed food (UPF) and Ultra-processed beverage (UPB) consumption is associated with higher risks of numerous non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Yet global consumption of these products is rising due to profound changes in production, processing, manufacturing, marketing, retail, and consumption practices, alongside the growth of the resources and political influence of Big Food. Whilst the sales of UPFs and UPBs in high-income countries (HICs) are stagnating, sales are rapidly expanding in more populous middle-income countries (MICs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The global milk formula market has 'boomed' in recent decades, raising serious concerns for breastfeeding, and child and maternal health. Despite these developments, few studies have investigated the global expansion of the baby food industry, nor the market and political practices corporations have used to grow and sustain their markets. In this paper, our aim is to understand the strategies used by the baby food industry to shape 'first-foods systems' across its diverse markets, and in doing so, drive milk formula consumption on a global scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCongenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) is associated with high early mortality. However, advances in newborn care have led to improved survival into adolescence and early adulthood. We report a 17-year-old adolescent boy with recurrent small bowel obstruction after CDH repair at 2 days of age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGambling causes significant levels of harm globally and is recognised as a serious public health issue. To reduce gambling-related harm, various strategies and policies have been recommended, including decreasing the availability of gambling products, restricting gambling advertising, and implementing public education campaigns. Government willingness to implement such strategies will be influenced by levels of public support, which in turn will be dependent on public perceptions of the harm caused by gambling products.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLotteries products (lottery tickets and scratch tickets) are the most popular forms of gambling worldwide, however little research has investigated whether these products are associated with gambling-related harm. The limited available research suggests these products are linked to problematic gambling behaviors and a range of resulting negative outcomes, with certain sub-groups appearing to be more vulnerable to experiencing harms. The present study examined risk of gambling-related harm (measured by the Problem Gambling Severity Index) from lotteries products use in an Australian sample of lotteries-only gamblers (n = 540).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Health care policy positions breastfeeding as an important part of the solution to household food insecurity; however, there are critical gaps in our knowledge of the relationship between breastfeeding duration (exposure variable) and household food insecurity (outcome variable). Our objective was to examine this relationship.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from 2008 to 2016 of healthy urban children (N = 3838) who were 0 to 3 years old and recruited from The Applied Research Group for Kids (TARGet Kids!), a practice-based research network in Toronto, Canada.