Food and health in Europe: a new basis for action.

Poor nutrition, foodborne disease and lack of secure access to good food make an important contribution to the burden of disease and death in the WHO European Region. Better diets, food safety and food security will not only reduce or prevent suffering to individuals and societies but also help cut costs to health care systems and bring social and economic benefits to countries. People's chances for a healthy diet depend less on individual choices than on what food is available and whether it is affordable.

Use of hand-to-hand impedancemetry to predict body composition of African women as measured by air displacement plethysmography.

Objectives: To test the validity of a simple, rapid, field-adapted, portable hand-held impedancemeter (HHI) for the estimation of lean body mass (LBM) and percentage body fat (%BF) in African women, and to develop specific predictive equations.

Design: Cross-sectional observational study.

Settings: Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, West Africa.

Diet, nutrition and the prevention of dental diseases.

Oral health is related to diet in many ways, for example, nutritional influences on craniofacial development, oral cancer and oral infectious diseases. Dental diseases impact considerably on self-esteem and quality of life and are expensive to treat. The objective of this paper is to review the evidence for an association between nutrition, diet and dental diseases and to present dietary recommendations for their prevention.

Change in body water distribution index in infants who become stunted between 4 and 18 months of age.

Objective: To evaluate body composition changes using bioelectrical impedance analysis and skinfold thickness measurements in infants from tropical areas who become stunted between 4-18 months of age.

Design And Measurements: Follow-up study. Extracellular water to total body water ratio index (length(2)/resistance at low to high frequency), peripheral fat (tricipital and subscapular skinfold thickness), and length-for-age index were studied at 4 and 18 months of age.

Sources of dietary iron in urban and provincial 4-year-old children in Iran.

Iron-deficiency anaemia is prevalent in childhood, especially in developing countries. Nutritional deficiency is one of the main causes of iron-deficiency anaemia, although absorption varies considerably between different dietary items. Information on the sources of iron in young children is limited.

Dietary changes in African urban households in response to currency devaluation: foreseeable risks for health and nutrition.

Objective: To investigate the effects of currency devaluation on dietary change and nutritional vulnerability of poor households in two African capital cities.

Design: A qualitative study based on 120 semistructured individual interviews and four focus group discussions in each city.

Setting: Dakar, Senegal (western Africa) and Brazzaville, Congo (central Africa).

Economic crisis and malnutrition: socioeconomic determinants of anthropometric status of preschool children and their mothers in an African urban area.

Objective: To assess the relative importance of socioeconomic and maternal/prenatal determinants of the nutritional situation of children < 6 years old in an urban African area after several years of economic crisis.

Design: Cross-sectional cluster sample survey.

Setting: Brazzaville, capital city of the Congo.

Deterioration in the nutritional status of young children and their mothers in Brazzaville, Congo, following the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc.

The effects of the January 1994 devaluation of the African Financial Community (CFA) franc on the nutritional situation of the populations concerned has been little documented. We report in this article on two nutritional cross-sectional surveys that were conducted before and after this devaluation (1993 and 1996) in two districts of Brazzaville, Congo. The surveys involved a representative sample of 4206 households with a child aged 4-23 months.

Effects of high dose vitamin C treatment on Helicobacter pylori infection and total vitamin C concentration in gastric juice.

Low gastric juice total vitamin C concentration in the presence of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection probably plays a role in gastric carcinogenesis. In vitro vitamin C has been shown to inhibit the growth of H.

Nutritional change and economic crisis in an urban Congolese community.

Background: In 1986, the government of Congo undertook a structural adjustment programme to cope with the economic crisis. We present the results of a study whose objectives were to assess the evolution of nutritional status of an urban community between 1986 and 1991 and to identify specific groups for which the nutritional status may have worsened.

Methods: Two cross-sectional surveys were carried out on representative samples of Brazzaville children < 6 years old: 2295 children were surveyed in 1986 and 2373 in 1991.

Total and domestic consumption of salt and their determinants in three regions of Italy.

Total and domestic (discretionary) consumption of salt was assessed in a sample of 91 households, which were randomly selected in three areas of Italy characterized by different dietary habits. Total salt intake was estimated by the mean urinary sodium in four 24 h collections. Discretionary salt, added during the preparation of the meals or at the table, was assessed using a simplified protocol of the lithium marker technique.