scholarly journals Facilitating Healthy Eating in Latin American Restaurants: Examining Acceptability and Barriers Among Restaurant Owners and Staff

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. 125-125
Author(s):  
Melissa Fuster ◽  
Rosa Abreu-Runkel ◽  
Terry T-K Huang ◽  
Michelle Rodriguez ◽  
Elise Harrison ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
Portion Size ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
The Us ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Verbatim Transcript

Abstract Objectives Examine the acceptability and potential barriers for the implementation of healthy eating promoting (HEP) strategies in independently-owned Latin American restaurants (LAR), including the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods LAR owners and staff were recruited via social media and community networks across the US. Potential participants completed an online survey (n = 20) on demographic and restaurant characteristics and current HEP strategies. Subsequently, we conducted semi-structured, online interviews with LAR owners and staff (n = 13) to examine attitudes of and barriers to the implementation of HEP strategies. Each verbatim transcript was analyzed by two coders using Dedoose, following an iterative process. Excerpts were rated according to how open respondents were to implement potential strategies (1 = opposed, 2 = neutral, 3 = open). Results The survey revealed that the most common HEP strategies already in place were offering vegetarian options (80%) and seafood (75%). The interviews asked about additional, potential HEP strategies, showing that the highest rated was the provision of nutrition information, with all excerpts rated as “open” (rate = 3). This was followed by increasing healthy options, notably vegetarian dishes (Mean excerpt rate = 2.9 ± 0.3); menu highlights (2.6 ± 0.9); and promotion of healthier options (2.5 ± 0.7). Portion size changes were rated the lowest (1.1 ± 0.3). The results included barriers identified for each strategy, the influence of COVID-19, and alternative strategies identified. Conclusions Latin communities present higher dietary risk factors for chronic disease, compared to non-Hispanic Whites. LARs are a significant source of dietary intake and have the potential to positively influence eating behaviors but are seldom engaged by public health. This research aimed to bridge this gap, finding common grounds for potential collaborations benefiting both community health and the wellbeing of these important community institutions. Funding Sources National Institutes of Health/NHLBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A scale for restaurant customers’ healthy menu choices: individual and environmental factors

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
EunHa Jeong ◽  
SooCheong (Shawn) Jang ◽  
Carl Behnke ◽  
James Anderson ◽  
Jonathon Day
Keyword(s):  
Factor Analysis ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
Survey Method ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Healthy Eating Behaviors

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the dimensions of restaurant customers’ engagement or disengagement with healthy eating in terms of individual and environmental factors to develop a scale. The results identified the underlying constructs of customers’ individual motives for and perceived barriers to healthy eating, as well as environmental elements of restaurants that encourage or discourage healthy eating. Design/methodology/approach To develop an appropriate set of measures to assess factors influencing customers’ healthy eating behaviors at restaurants, the current study undertook the five steps of scale development suggested by Churchill (1979): specifying the domain of constructs, generating a pool of initial measurement items, assessing content adequacy, administering questionnaires (an online survey method) and purifying and finalizing the measurement (via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using 410 samples and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using 423 samples). Findings The results revealed ten individual factors (health, body image, weight control, feeling better, unappealing food, cost perception, lack of knowledge, state of mind (stress), lack of self-control and negative influences) and five environmental factors (healthy indications, social impact, availability of healthy menu, price policy and unhealthy indications) influencing customers’ healthy eating behaviors at restaurants. Originality/value This study developed an appropriate set of measures to assess individual and environmental factors influencing restaurant customers’ healthy eating behaviors, along with identifying underlying sub-constructs. The reliability and validity of the scale and the factor structure are presented and potential applications and theoretical contributions of the scale are provided as well.

scholarly journals Changes in Self-reported Healthy Eating Behavior Frequency and Nutrition Knowledge Among Youth Participating in the WeCook Program (FS16-08-19)

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Miramonti ◽  
James Bovaird ◽  
Tara Dunker ◽  
Lisa Franzen-Castle ◽  
Michelle Krehbiel
Keyword(s):  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
Nutrition Knowledge ◽  
Food Groups ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Food And Agriculture ◽  
Healthy Eating Behavior ◽  
Eating Fruit ◽  
Behavior Frequency ◽  
Healthy Eating Behaviors

Abstract Objectives Assess changes in healthy eating behaviors and nutrition knowledge in youth after participating in the WeCook program. Methods 107 4th-5th grade students from two Title I elementary schools in Nebraska participated in a 12-week afterschool program focused on nutrition, cooking, and physical activity (WeCook). Students completed surveys and a nutrition knowledge assessment based on the MyPlate guidelines at the beginning (T1) and end (T2) of the program. Surveys included 4 questions regarding self-reported frequency of healthy eating behaviors (EB) on a 0–3 scale. For the MyPlate (MP) assessment, youth were asked to build a healthy plate using a blank MyPlate template and food models. Plates were scored using a system based on the 5 food groups on a healthy plate per the MyPlate guidelines (fruit, vegetable, protein, grain, dairy); 1 point was given for each of the correct food groups (maximum score = 5). Friedman tests were used to assess changes from T1 to T2 for the each of the EB questions, each of the categories for MP, and the total scores for EB and MP. Results There was no change from T1 to T2 for the EB total score (χ2(df=1) = 2.722, P = 0.099). There was an increase in the frequency of choosing healthy snacks (χ2(df=1) = 9.00, P = 0.003), but no other individual EB questions (P ≥ 0.639). There was an increase in the MP total score from T1 ($\bar{x}$ = 3.92) to T2 ($\bar{x}$ = 4.34, χ2(df=1) = 2.72, P = 0.099), and an increase in the proportion of youth who scored points for fruits (T1: $\bar{x}$ = 0.92, T2: $\bar{x}$ = 1.00, χ2(df=1) = 8.00, P = 0.005) and grains (T1: $\bar{x}$ = 0.51, T2: $\bar{x}$ = 0.73, χ2(df=1) = 11.52, P = 0.001), but not vegetables, protein, or dairy (P ≥ 0.24). Conclusions After participating in the WeCook program youth reported increased frequency of choosing healthy snacks, but there were no significant increases in reported frequency of eating fruit, vegetables, or breakfast. Youth were more likely to correctly include fruits and grains on the MyPlate assessment after the intervention. There was no change in the likelihood of youth including vegetables, protein, or dairy on the MyPlate assessment, possibly because ≥74% of youth scored points in these categories at T1, leaving little room for improvement at T2. Funding Sources The WeCook program and this research were funded by the Child, Youth, and Families at Risk grant through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

scholarly journals Examining the Relationship Between Intuitive Eating and Diet Quality Among College Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. 1290-1290
Author(s):  
Julia Borelli ◽  
Giselle Pereira Pignotti ◽  
Adrianne Widaman
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Diet Quality ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Eating Behaviors ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Healthy Eating Index ◽  
Intuitive Eating ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Study Participants

Abstract Objectives College students in the US tend to have low diet quality due to a confluence of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and environmental factors. Restrictive dieting is commonly used for weight management but often ineffective in the long term and can lead to dangerous eating behaviors. Intuitive eating is an adaptive form of eating that has gained interest as an alternative to restrictive dieting due to its successful use in eating disorder recovery and correlation with decreased body mass index in healthy populations. The objective of the current study was to identify if higher intuitive eating, as measured by the intuitive eating scale (IES-2), correlated with increased diet quality, as measured by the Healthy Eating Index 2015 (HEI-2015) in a college sample. Methods In this cross-sectional study, participants completed an online survey containing the IES-2 questionnaire which provides a total score for intuitive eating and four subscale scores representing the main behaviors of intuitive eating. The dietary intake of participants was assessed with up to three 24-hour diet recalls, which were completed over the phone. A total of 55 participants (40 females and 15 males) completed the survey and a minimum of two 24-hour diet recalls, which were used to calculate the HEI-2015. Independent sample t-test and Pearson's correlation were used for statistical analysis. Results The total IES-2 scores were higher for males than females (82.9 ± 8.1 vs. 76.3 ± 11.2, P = 0.04). The average total HEI-2015 score was 59.5 ± 15.1 and did not differ between gender (P = 0.93). The total IES-2 score was not significantly correlated with the total HEI scores (r = −0.218, P = 0.11), and one subscale of the IES-2, the Unconditional Permission to Eat subscale, was negatively correlated with the total HEI score (r = −0.418, P < 0.01) and BMI (r = −0.335, P < 0.05). Conclusions The results of the study do not support that intuitive eating is correlated with diet quality, furthermore, increased scores of the Unconditional Permission to Eat subscale of intuitive eating was correlated with a lower diet quality suggesting that intuitive eating and diet quality may be separate constructs that should be addressed individually. Funding Sources None.

Associations of Mother’s Behaviors and Home/Neighborhood Environments with Preschool Children’s Physical Activity Behaviors

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-86
Author(s):  
Man Zhang ◽  
Virginia Quick ◽  
Yanhong Jin ◽  
Jennifer Martin-Biggers
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Screen Time ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Negative Binomial ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Healthy Behaviors ◽  
The Us ◽  
Healthy Eating Habits

Objective: Examining associations of mother’s behaviors and home/neighborhood physical activity (PA) environments with preschoolers’ PA and screen time. Design: Cross-sectional online survey. Setting: Mothers with a 2 to 5 years old preschooler were recruited from the US panel members of Survey Sampling International. Participants: Five hundred thirty-one mothers with a preschool child aged 2 to 5 years old. Outcome Measure: Child daily screen time and PA, mother–child inside- and outside-home co-PA. Analysis: K-mean cluster analysis and Logit and negative binomial regressions. Results: Mothers’ healthy behaviors, such as decreased screen time, healthy eating habits, and increased PA, and perceived importance for PA were significantly ( P < .05) associated with preschoolers’ decreased screen time and increased PA. Available toys ( P < .01) and maternal perceived neighborhood safety ( P < .05) were negatively correlated with preschoolers’ screen time, while available room space ( P < .01) was positively correlated with preschoolers’ PA. Variables positively correlated with mother–child co-PA included mothers’ PA ( P < .001) and healthy eating habits ( P < .05), and home room space ( P < .05) for inside-home, and yard space and quality ( P < .05) for outside-home. Conclusions: Mother’s role modeling and home PA environment were positively associated with preschoolers’ PA behavior.

Reagan and Thatcher's Special Relationship

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally-Ann Treharne
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Pivotal Moments ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Latin American Region ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Elite Interviews ◽  
Personal Diplomacy ◽  
The Cold War

Reagan and Thatcher’s Special Relationship offers a unique insight into one of the most controversial political relationships in recent history. An insightful and original study, it provides a new regionally focused approach to the study of Anglo-American relations. The Falklands War, the US invasion of Grenada, the Anglo-Guatemalan dispute over Belize and the US involvement in Nicaragua are vividly reconstructed as Latin American crises that threatened to overwhelm a renewal in US-UK relations in the 1980s. Reagan and Thatcher’s efforts to normalise relations, both during and after the crises, reveal a mutual desire to strengthen Anglo-American ties and to safeguard individual foreign policy objectives whilst cultivating a close personal and political bond that was to last well beyond their terms in office. This ground-breaking reappraisal analyses pivotal moments in their shared history by drawing on the extensive analysis of recently declassified documents while elite interviews reveal candid recollections by key protagonists providing an alternative vantage point from which to assess the contentious ‘Special Relationship’. Sally-Ann Treharne offers a compelling look into the role personal diplomacy played in overcoming obstacles to Anglo-American relations emanating from the turbulent Latin American region in the final years of the Cold War.

Geo-Economic Competition in Latin America: Brazil, Venezuela, and Regional Integration in the 21st Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Casarões
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Free Trade Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Integration Model ◽  
Trade Area ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Institutions

The institutional framework of Latin American integration saw a period of intense transformation in the 2000s, with the death of the ambitious project of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), spearheaded by the United States, and the birth of two new institutions, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This article offers a historical reconstruction of regional integration structures in the 2000s, with emphasis on the fault lines between Brazil, Venezuela and the US, and how they have shaped the institutional order across the hemisphere. We argue that the shaping of UNASUR and CELAC, launched respectively in 2007 and 2010, is the outcome of three complex processes: (1) Brazil’s struggle to strengthen Mercosur by acting more decisively as a regional paymaster; (2) Washington’s selective engagement with some key regional players, notably Colombia, and (3) Venezuela’s construction of an alternative integration model through the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) and oil diplomacy. If UNASUR corresponded to Brazil’s strategy to neutralize the growing role of Caracas in South America and to break apart the emerging alliance between Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia, CELAC was at the same time a means to keep the US away from regional decisions, and to weaken the Caracas-Havana axis that sustained ALBA.

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

An Inter-American Episode

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Pablo Neruda ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
The South ◽  
American Reader ◽  
The North ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Us

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.

Anxieties of Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Interpretation

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

Charismatic, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Movements in Europe, the US, and Brazil

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Healing Rituals ◽  
The Us ◽  
Latin American Countries

The growth of Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism is widely regarded as a potent argument against the validity of secularization theory. To explain this growth, Chapter 12 draws on theoretical approaches to analysing new social movements, which allows an expansion of the repertoire of explanations concerning religious change and a testing of alternatives to the models provided by secularization theory. To explain the worldwide growth and relative resilience of the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, the chapter identifies a number of conditions and explanatory factors: cultural and social confirmation, religious syncretism, social deprivation, and the widespread magical worldview and broadly accepted spiritistic beliefs in Latin American countries that are conducive to the acceptance of Pentecostal experiences and healing rituals.

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