Environmental variables can enable or impede children concerning what foods they consume. Availability and accessibility of foods are potentially important environmental variables. Availability concerns whether the foods are present in the home or school, while accessibility concerns whether the foods are prepared, presented, andor maintained in a form that enables or encourages children to eat them. We hypothesized that greater availability and accessibility would lead to more consumption. Baseline data from two school nutrition education projects were used to examine relationships between availabilitylaccessibility and consumption offruits and vegetables. In one study, children's consumption of fruits and vegetables (from seven day food records) was related to home availability and accessibility (as assessed by a parent telephone interview), after controlling for psychosocial characteristics. In the second study, children ate more fruits and vegetables for lunch at schools that offered more fruits and vegetables for lunch, after controlling for socioeconomic status. These results offer preliminary support for the hypothesized relationships. Future research must delineate the anticipated complex relationships among food purchase and preparation practices that lead to availability and accessibility, child and parent food preferences, and consumption, in order to more clearly guide interventions.

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Hostility as measured by the Cook-Medley Hostility (HO) Scale on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory has been suggested as a risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD) and total mortality. This study tested the HO-CHD hypothesis in a sample of 1399 men who entered the University of Minnesota in 1953 and, as part of freshman orientation, completed the MMPI. Current health status was ascertained for 94% of the sample through telephone interviews 33 years later. Higher HO scores did not predict CHD mortality, CHD morbidity, or total mortality either before or after adjustment for baseline risk factors. Among the plausible explanations for these results are that (1) hostility is not a risk factor in all populations, (2) the HO scale at age 19 does not assess a stable psychological characteristic, or (3) the HO scale is not an adequate measure of hostility.

This study compares the long-term outcomes of a school-based program to an equivalent home-based program with 2250 third-grade students in 31 urban schools in Minnesota and North Dakota in order to detect changes in dietary fat and sodium consumption. The school-based program, The Adventures of Hearty Heart and Friends, involved 15 sessions over five weeks in the third-grade classrooms. The home-based program, the Hearty Heart Home Team, involved a five-week correspondence course with the third graders, where parental involvement was necessary in order to complete the activities. Outcome measures included anthropometric, psychosocial, and behavioral assessments at school, and dietary recall, food shelf inventories, and urinary sodium data collected in the students' homes. Participation rates for all aspects of the study were notably high. Eighty-six percent of the parents participated in the Home Team and 71% (almost 1000 families) completed the five-week course. Students in the home-based program reported more behavior change at posttest, had reduced the total fat, saturated fat, and monounsaturated fat in their diets and increased their complex carbohydrate consumption. The changes derived from the dietary recall data did not maintain after one year. The data converge to suggest the feasibility and importance of parental involvement for initiating health behavior changes with children of this age.

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