Grandparents in caregiving roles may negatively influence the dietary intake and weight status of their grandchildren. More rigorous, targeted studies are required to further define the mechanisms by which grandparents' knowledge, attitudes and feeding behaviours may influence child dietary intake. This review suggests that grandparents may be an important audience to target in future child nutrition interventions.
Senior community football clubs primarily stock and sell unhealthy food and beverage items. There is support within clubs for providing more healthy options; however, clubs face a number of barriers to the inclusion of healthy foods in club canteens.
BackgroundSocial marketing integrates communication campaigns with behavioural and environmental change strategies. Childhood obesity programs could benefit significantly from social marketing but communication campaigns on this issue tend to be stand-alone.MethodsA large-scale multi-setting child obesity prevention program was implemented in the Hunter New England (HNE) region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia from 2005–2010. The program included a series of communication campaigns promoting the program and its key messages: drinking water; getting physically active and; eating more vegetables and fruit. Pre-post telephone surveys (n = 9) were undertaken to evaluate awareness of the campaigns among parents of children aged 2–15 years using repeat cross-sections of randomly selected cohorts. A total of 1,367 parents (HNE = 748, NSW = 619) participated.ResultsAt each survey post baseline, HNE parents were significantly more likely to have seen, read or heard about the program and its messages in the media than parents in the remainder of the state (p < 0.001). Further, there was a significant increase in awareness of the program and each of its messages over time in HNE compared to no change over time in NSW (p < 0.001). Awareness was significantly higher (p < 0.05) in HNE compared to NSW after each specific campaign (except the vegetable one) and significantly higher awareness levels were sustained for each campaign until the end of the program. At the end of the program participants without a tertiary education were significantly more likely (p = 0.04) to be aware of the brand campaign (31%) than those with (20%) but there were no other statistically significant socio-demographic differences in awareness.ConclusionsThe Good for Kids communication campaigns increased and maintained awareness of childhood obesity prevention messages. Moreover, messages were delivered equitably to diverse socio-demographic groups within the region.
BackgroundStatistical analyses of whole genome expression data require functional information about genes in order to yield meaningful biological conclusions. The Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) are common sources of functionally grouped gene sets. For bacteria, the SEED and MicrobesOnline provide alternative, complementary sources of gene sets. To date, no comprehensive evaluation of the data obtained from these resources has been performed.ResultsWe define a series of gene set consistency metrics directly related to the most common classes of statistical analyses for gene expression data, and then perform a comprehensive analysis of 3581 Affymetrix® gene expression arrays across 17 diverse bacteria. We find that gene sets obtained from GO and KEGG demonstrate lower consistency than those obtained from the SEED and MicrobesOnline, regardless of gene set size.ConclusionsDespite the widespread use of GO and KEGG gene sets in bacterial gene expression data analysis, the SEED and MicrobesOnline provide more consistent sets for a wide variety of statistical analyses. Increased use of the SEED and MicrobesOnline gene sets in the analysis of bacterial gene expression data may improve statistical power and utility of expression data.
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