The objective of this study was to evaluate effects of increasing the inclusion of dry-rolled hybrid rye (HR) as a replacement for dry-rolled barley grain (DRB) on feed intake, ruminal fermentation, and the site and extent of nutrient digestion for finishing cattle. Eight ruminally and duodenally cannulated Hereford-cross heifers were used in a replicated 4 × 4 Latin square design with 21-d periods including 15 d of dietary adaptation and 6 d of data and sample collection. Dietary treatments included a control diet with 10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The lack of regular physical activity (PA) in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) in the United States is an ongoing health crisis. Regular PA and exercise-based interventions have been linked with improved outcomes and healthier lifestyles among those with SCI. Providing people with an accurate estimate of their everyday PA level can promote PA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objectives were to compare cereal grain and straw yield between barley and hybrid rye () and to evaluate whether the inclusion of dry-rolled HR grain as a replacement for barley grain affected feed intake and growth for growing cattle, and feed intake, growth, and carcass characteristics for finishing cattle. Crop yield was measured by directly weighing harvested grain and straw bales ( = 3 plots/grain type). Three-hundred sixty steers with an initial body weight () of 348 ± 40 kg were stratified by BW and randomly assigned to 1 of the 24 pens during the growing phase ( = 8; 65 d).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is growing recognition that current food systems are both unhealthy and unsustainable, and are increasingly shifting toward the supply and marketing of unhealthy, ultra-processed foods and beverages. Large food companies hold substantial power within food systems and present a significant barrier to progress on addressing issues related to nutrition and obesity prevention. Institutional investors (such as pension funds) play a key role in influencing corporate governance and practices, and are increasingly incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations within investment decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose Of Review: The aim of this paper is to summarise current trends and new developments with regard to institutional investor actions related to nutrition and obesity prevention.
Recent Findings: Investor-related activity related to improving population diets is building, with several recent initiatives aiming to accelerate achievement of global nutrition goals. There is increasing civil society and investor activism focused on leveraging investor influence to improve nutrition-related food company actions.
Investigating and improving the effects of behaviour change interventions requires detailed and consistent specification of all aspects of interventions. An important feature of interventions is the way in which these are delivered, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To advance understanding of how message framing can be used to maximise public support across different pricing policies for alcohol, tobacco and sugary drinks/foods that prevent consumption of cancer-causing products.
Design: We designed a 3×4×3 randomised factorial experiment to test responses to messages with three pricing policies, four message frames and three products.
Setting: Online survey panel (Qualtrics) in 2019.
Introduction: Responsible investment (RI), in which environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations are incorporated into investment decision making, is a potentially powerful tool for increasing corporate accountability and improving corporate practices to address broad societal challenges. Whilst the RI sector is growing, there is limited understanding of the extent to which pressing social issues, such as obesity and unhealthy population diets, are incorporated within RI decision making. This study aimed to investigate the extent to which obesity prevention and population nutrition are considered by Australian institutional investors engaged in responsible investment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Health Policy Manag
December 2021
Background: One important way to transform food systems for human and planetary health would be to reduce the production and consumption of animals for food. The over-production and over-consumption of meat and dairy products is resource-intensive, energy-dense and creates public health and food equity risks, including the creation of superbugs and antimicrobial resistance, contamination and pollution of land and waterways, and injustice to animals and humans who work in the sector. Yet the continuing and expanding use of animals is entrenched in food systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: Contextual factors such as an intervention's setting are key to understanding how interventions to change behaviour have their effects and patterns of generalisation across contexts. The intervention's setting is not consistently reported in published reports of evaluations. Using ontologies to specify and classify intervention setting characteristics enables clear and reproducible reporting, thus aiding replication, implementation and evidence synthesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Behavioral interventions typically include multiple behavior change techniques (BCTs). The theory informing the selection of BCTs for an intervention may be stated explicitly or remain unreported, thus impeding the identification of links between theory and behavior change outcomes.
Purpose: This study aimed to identify groups of BCTs commonly occurring together in behavior change interventions and examine whether behavior change theories underlying these groups could be identified.
Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers develop interventions to change behavior based on their understanding of how behavior change techniques (BCTs) impact the determinants of behavior. A transparent, systematic, and accessible method of linking BCTs with the processes through which they change behavior (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To analyse the evolution of the soft drink industry's use of self-regulation as a response to obesity and examine the motivations driving its development and the strategies used to promote it to policy makers.
Design: We used a data set of industry documents published by the Australian Beverages Council (ABC) between 1998 and 2016. We analysed how the ABC voiced its political motivations about self-regulation and what internal nutrition policies it developed prior to its public launch of self-regulation.
Use of natural language to represent behaviour-change theories has resulted in lack of clarity and consistency, hindering comparison, integration, development and use. This paper describes development of a formal system for representing behaviour-change theories that aims to improve clarity and consistency. A given theory is represented in terms of (1) its component constructs (for example, 'self-efficacy', 'perceived threat' or 'subjective norm'), which are labelled and defined, and (2) relationships between pairs of constructs, which may be causal, structural or semantic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the version of this Comment originally published, the Acknowledgements section was missing information about the support from the National Institutes of Health Science of Behavior Change Common Fund Program; the full text should have read 'This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science of Behavior Change Common Fund Program through an award administered by the National Institute on Aging (U24AG052175) and by a Wellcome Trust collaborative award (The Human Behaviour-Change Project: Building the science of behaviour change for complex intervention development, 201,524/Z/16/Z).' This has now been corrected in all versions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Understanding the mechanisms through which behavior change techniques (BCTs) can modify behavior is important for the development and evaluation of effective behavioral interventions. To advance the field, we require a shared knowledge of the mechanisms of action (MoAs) through which BCTs may operate when influencing behavior.
Purpose: To elicit expert consensus on links between BCTs and MoAs.
Background: Despite advances in behavioral science, there is no widely shared understanding of the "mechanisms of action" (MoAs) through which individual behavior change techniques (BCTs) have their effects. Cumulative progress in the development, evaluation, and synthesis of behavioral interventions could be improved by identifying the MoAs through which BCTs are believed to bring about change.
Purpose: This study aimed to identify the links between BCTs and MoAs described by authors of a corpus of published literature.
We present the case of a 77-year-old woman who had an accidental fall in her garden, resulting in a fracture of her left ankle. After manipulation of the fracture, she developed sudden onset shortness of breath. An echo led to the diagnosis of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Bills have been put forward in the UK and Republic of Ireland proposing a move to Central European Time (CET). Proponents argue that such a change will have benefits for road safety, with daylight being shifted from the morning, when collision risk is lower, to the evening, when risk is higher. Studies examining the impact of daylight saving time (DST) on road traffic collision risk can help inform the debate on the potential road safety benefits of a move to CET.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe establish well-defined limits in which the time-dependent electronic currents across a molecular junction subject to a fluctuating environment can be quantitatively captured via the Landauer steady-state approximation. For this, we calculate the exact time-dependent non-equilibrium Green's function (TD-NEGF) current along a model two-site molecular junction, in which the site energies are subject to correlated noise, and contrast it with that obtained from the Landauer approach. The ability of the steady-state approximation to capture the TD-NEGF behavior at each instant of time is quantified via the same-time correlation function of the currents obtained from the two methods, while their global agreement is quantified by examining differences in the average currents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Health communications often present graphic, threat-based representations of the potential consequences of health-risk behaviours. These 'threat appeals' feature prominently in public health campaigns, but their use is controversial, with studies investigating their efficacy reporting inconsistent, and often negative, findings. This research examined the impact of a threat-based road safety advertisement on the driving behaviour of young male drivers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Understanding links between behaviour change techniques (BCTs) and mechanisms of action (the processes through which they affect behaviour) helps inform the systematic development of behaviour change interventions.
Purpose: This research aims to develop and test a methodology for linking BCTs to their mechanisms of action.
Methods: Study 1 (published explicit links): Hypothesised links between 93 BCTs (from the 93-item BCT taxonomy, BCTTv1) and mechanisms of action will be identified from published interventions and their frequency, explicitness and precision documented.