Nutritional anthropology in the world.

Nutritional anthropology is the study of human subsistence, diet and nutrition in comparative social and evolutionary perspective. Many factors influence the nutritional health and well-being of populations, including evolutionary, ecological, social, cultural and historical ones. Most usually, biocultural approaches are used in nutritional anthropology, incorporating methods and theory from social science as well as nutritional and evolutionary science.

Translating models of obesity to tackle common obesity.

Tackling common obesity rests on having models of obesity that can be effectively translated into models for intervention; are we nearly there yet?

Obesity and environments external to the body.

Studies of environment and obesity usually use epidemiologically tractable measures that are proxies for energy balance or macronutrient composition intake, mostly to identify individual behavioural changes for prevention or reduction of obesity, or inform policy. Of environments external to the body as they relate to obesity, the built environment and the food environment are considered among the most important. Incorporating human sociality into obesity and environments research enriches the field by offering possible ways for understanding obesity production via social stress, dietary preference, food consumption and physical activity.

Concealed pregnancy as an act of care? A qualitative analysis of motivations for concealing and non-disclosure of early pregnancy in The Gambia.

Background: A barrier to achieving first trimester antenatal care (ANC) attendance in many countries has been the widespread cultural practice of not discussing pregnancies in the early stages. Motivations for concealing pregnancy bear further study, as the interventions necessary to encourage early ANC attendance may be more complicated than targeting infrastructural barriers to ANC attendance such as transportation, time, and cost.

Methods: Five focus groups with a total of 30 married, pregnant women were conducted to assess the feasibility of conducting a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of early initiation of physical activity and/or yoghurt consumption in reducing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus in pregnant women in The Gambia.

The social origins of obesity within and across generations.

We propose a model for obesity development that traces a considerable part of its origins to the social domain (mainly different forms of prolonged social adversity), both within and across generations, working in tandem with a genetic predisposition. To facilitate overview of social pathways, we place particular focus on three areas that form a cascading sequence: (A) social adversity within the family (parents having a low education, a low social position, poverty and financial insecurity; offspring being exposed to gestational stress, unmet social and emotional needs, abuse, maltreatment and other negative life events, social deprivation and relationship discord); (B) increasing levels of insecurity, negative emotions, chronic stress, and a disruption of energy homeostasis; and (C) weight gain and obesity, eliciting further social stress and weight stigma in both generations. Social adversity, when combined with genetic predisposition, thereby substantially contributes to highly effective transmission of obesity from parents to offspring, as well as to obesity development within current generations.

Women, Mobility, and Education in Twentieth-century England and Wales: A New Analytical Approach.

The twentieth century saw substantial changes in the educational and occupational opportunities available to women in Britain. These may have been supposed to foster new patterns of female mobility. Yet studies of women's intergenerational mobility are rare and tend not to focus on education.

How active can preschoolers be at home? Parents' and grandparents' perceptions of children's day-to-day activity, with implications for physical activity policy.

Background: The importance of physical activity in early childhood for establishing long-term health is well understood, yet with the exception of recent WHO guidelines, public health initiatives rarely focus on children below school age. Moreover, little is known about how domestic spaces and day-to-day caring activities influence preschool-age children's physical activity. To examine this, we explore caregivers' perceptions of young children's activities within and outside the home, and we consider how lived experiences of caregiving align (or not) with current physical activity policy.

Pregnancy-related interventions in mothers at risk for gestational diabetes in Asian India and low and middle-income countries (PRIMORDIAL study): protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

Introduction: Lifestyle modification is the mainstay of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) prevention. However, clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of diet or physical activity (PA) in low-income and middle-income settings such as Africa and India are lacking. This trial aims to evaluate the efficacy of yoghurt consumption and increased PA (daily walking) in reducing GDM incidence in high-risk pregnant women.

Ecological Sensing Through Taste and Chemosensation Mediates Inflammation: A Biological Anthropological Approach.

Ecological sensing and inflammation have evolved to ensure optima between organism survival and reproductive success in different and changing environments. At the molecular level, ecological sensing consists of many types of receptors located in different tissues that orchestrate integrated responses (immune, neuroendocrine systems) to external and internal stimuli. This review describes emerging data on taste and chemosensory receptors, proposing them as broad ecological sensors and providing evidence that taste perception is shaped not only according to sense epitopes from nutrients but also in response to highly diverse external and internal stimuli.

How does psychosocial stress affect the relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and overweight and obesity? Examining Hemmingsson's model with data from a Danish longitudinal study.

Background: Chronic stress in childhood may increase the risk of overweight and obesity in young people. Erik Hemmingsson has suggested a new obesity causation model which focuses on psychosocial stress. The aim was to examine the associations between socioeconomic disadvantage and overweight and obesity and examine if these associations attenuate, when the effect of the different domains from Eric Hemmingsson's obesity causation model were taken into account.

Identifying notions of environment in obesity research using a mixed-methods approach.

The recent rise of computation-based methods in social science has opened new opportunities for exploring qualitative questions through analysis of large amounts of text. This article uses a mixed-methods design that incorporates machine reading, network analysis, semantic analysis, and qualitative analysis of 414 highly cited publications on obesogenic environments between 2001 and 2015. The method produces an elaborate network map exhibiting five distinct notions of environment, all of which are currently active in the field of obesity research.

The 'who' and 'what' of #diabetes on Twitter.

Social media are being increasingly used for health promotion, yet the landscape of users, messages and interactions in such fora is poorly understood. Studies of social media and diabetes have focused mostly on patients, or public agencies addressing it, but have not looked broadly at all of the participants or the diversity of content they contribute. We study Twitter conversations about diabetes through the systematic analysis of 2.

Framing obesity in UK policy from the Blair years, 1997-2015: the persistence of individualistic approaches despite overwhelming evidence of societal and economic factors, and the need for collective responsibility.

Since 1997, and despite several political changes, obesity policy in the UK has overwhelmingly framed obesity as a problem of individual responsibility. Reports, policies and interventions have emphasized that it is the responsibility of individual consumers to make personal changes to reduce obesity. The Foresight Report 'Tackling Obesities: Future Choices' (2007) attempted to reframe obesity as a complex problem that required multiple sites of intervention well beyond the range of personal responsibility.

Obesity emergence in the Pacific islands: why understanding colonial history and social change is important.

Objective: Between 1980 and 2008, two Pacific island nations - Nauru and the Cook Islands - experienced the fastest rates of increasing BMI in the world. Rates were over four times higher than the mean global BMI increase. The aim of the present paper is to examine why these populations have been so prone to obesity increases in recent times.

Do adult obesity rates in England vary by insecurity as well as by inequality? An ecological cross-sectional study.

Objective: Geographical variations in adult obesity rates have been attributed in part to variations in social and economic inequalities. Insecurity is associated with obesity at the cross-national level, but there is little empirical evidence to show that insecurity contributes to the structuring of adult obesity rates at the subnational level. This is examined in this study across local authorities in England, using a recently developed social classification for the British population.

Concluding remarks: what's in a name? "Negritos" in the context of the human prehistory of Southeast Asia.

The "negrito" hypothesis posits that various indigenous groups throughout Island and Mainland Southeast Asia have a shared phenotype due to common descent from a putative ancestral population, representing a pre-agricultural substrate of humanity in the region. This has been examined and tested many times in the past, with no clear resolution. With many new resources to hand, the articles in this volume reexamine this hypothesis in a range of different ways.

Relative fat distribution in relation to menarcheal status among Bengalee Hindu girls of West Bengal, India.

Background: Menarche seems be related to the relative distribution rather than the total amount of body fat. Previous studies showed that the ratio between lower-body vs. upper-body fat was associated with the timing of menarche.

Predicting adult obesity from measures in earlier life.

Background: As most obese adults were not overweight as children, the prediction of adult obesity from childhood body size alone is limited. We constructed a two-way, multifactor risk assessment framework for predicting adult obesity during childhood using the Foresight Obesity System Map and tested it against longitudinal data from the 1958 National Child Development Study.

Methods: The framework divided study participants according to two categories of risk: 'conditioning factors' (past/fixed events and conditions) and 'intervention factors' (present and modifiable).

Variation in height and BMI of adult Indians.

It is well known that height and weight are interrelated, and that both are related to socioeconomic variables. The objective of this study was to assess the effect of socioeconomic variables on the heights and weights of different groups of people, formed according to different levels of heights and weights, and to see whether there are sex differences in the variations in heights and weights. Data for adults aged 15-49 years were taken from the India National Family Health Survey-3 and descriptive studies and multiple linear regression analyses carried out.

Results of epidemiological studies of blood pressure are biased by continuous variation in arm size related to body mass.

In cross-sectional epidemiological studies, blood pressure (BP) is often found to be positively correlated with fatness. Usually sphygmomanometers with only one cuff size for adults are used to measure BP while arm circumference (AC) influences BP readings. We have studied cross-sectional anthropometric and BP data of adult men and women from three populations: Cook Islanders (n = 259), Papua New Guinean: Purari (n = 295), and Ok Tedi (n = 274).