scholarly journals Diet, risk of obesity and socioeconomic circumstances of individuals in the UK: A seemingly unrelated approach

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Damilola Olajide ◽  
Anne Ludbrook

Understanding the link between diet, risk of obesity and the underlying socioeconomic circumstances of the individual is useful for health promotion and improvement interventions. In this study, we examined the socioeconomic factors that jointly affect food consumption choices and risk of obesity. We analyse the National Dietary and Nutrition Survey (2000/01) of adults aged 19-64 years living in private households in the UK, using a health production framework. We used information on the complete food history on individuals in the previous week to create eight common food groups. We estimated a system of linear risk of obesity (as measured by Body Mass Index) and eight diet equations with error terms that are correlated across equations for a given individual, but are uncorrelated across individuals, using the seemingly unrelated regression method. Our findings indicate that the socioeconomic factors (e.g. income and education) associated with sources of healthy eating differ. While increasing household purchasing power may be more effective for increasing consumption of healthier foods such as fruit and vegetables, more knowledge and information about healthy eating may be more effective for cutting down on consumption of less healthy foods (e.g. preserves and savoury foods). An understanding of these different healthy eating contexts is essential for the development of effective targeted food based policies aimed at reducing the risk of obesity. Link to Appendix

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Liam R. Chawner ◽  
Pam Blundell-Birtill ◽  
Marion M. Hetherington

Abstract Children’s vegetable consumption is generally below national recommendations in the UK. This study examined predictors of vegetable intake by children aged 1·5–18 years using counts and portion sizes derived from 4-d UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey food diaries. Data from 6548 children were examined using linear and logit multilevel models. Specifically, we examined whether demographic variables predicted vegetable consumption, whether environmental context influenced portion sizes of vegetables consumed and which food groups predicted the presence (or absence) of vegetables at an eating occasion (EO). Larger average daily intake of vegetables (g) was predicted by age, ethnicity, equivalised income, variety of vegetables eaten and average energy intake per d (R2 0·549). At a single EO, vegetables were consumed in larger portion sizes at home, with family members and at evening mealtimes (Conditional R2 0·308). Within EO, certain configurations of food groups such as carbohydrates and protein predicted higher odds of vegetables being present (OR 12·85, 95 % CI 9·42, 17·54), whereas foods high in fats, sugars and salt predicted a lower likelihood of vegetable presence (OR 0·03, 95 % CI 0·02, 0·04). Vegetables were rarely eaten alone without other food groups. These findings demonstrate that only one portion of vegetables was eaten per d (median) and this was consumed at a single EO, therefore falling below recommendations. Future research should investigate ways to encourage vegetable intake at times when vegetables are not regularly eaten, such as for breakfast and as snacks, whilst considering which other, potentially competing, foods are presented alongside vegetables.


Current dietary patterns 30 Information on current dietary patterns in the UK is taken from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS). NDNS is a rolling programme commissioned by PHE and FSA, and surveys people aged 1.5 years and older living in private households. Combined intakes in 2009 and 2011–2012 for adults aged 19–64 years (conducted between February 2008 and June 2009) and the 2000/01 survey are reported as appropriate....


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Vida Zohoori ◽  
Anne Maguire

It is important to monitor systemic fluoride (F) intake from foods, drinks and inadvertent toothpaste ingestion in order to minimise the risk of dental fluorosis while maximising caries prevention. In the UK, an F database containing the F content of commercially available foods and drinks was compiled from 518 products analysed using an acid-diffusion method and F-ion-selective electrode. The individual products analysed ranged from <0.01 µg F/100 g for butter/margarine (miscellaneous foods group) to 1,054.20 µg F/100 g for canned sardines (fish group). These findings, along with the wide range of F contents found within the food groups, highlight the need for comprehensive F content labelling of food and drink products.


Author(s):  
Mathilde Gressier ◽  
Gary Frost

AbstractThe benefits of increasing populations’ and individuals’ fibre intake on non-communicable disease risk have been known and promoted for decades in the UK and in the world. Public health campaigns, including dietary recommendations, called populations to increase their consumption of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, while manufacturers increased the fibre content of their products. In particular, the SACN report in 2015 highlighted the importance of fibres for the UK population. We analysed trends in fibre consumption for the whole population, by age group and gender using the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey from 2008/09 to 2016/17. We investigated changes in total fibre intake and calculated the contribution to fibre intake and time trends from each food group. We compared the fibre content of food groups between 2008/09 and 2016/17. We found that fibre intake remained fairly stable. While the fibre content of some cereal-based products increased, it decreased for potato-based products. All age groups derived increasing fibre from pasta and other cereal-based products, and decreasing fibre from potato products. Adults, but not children or adolescents derived more fibre from vegetables. This resulted in an increase in fibre intake in adults, but not in children or adolescents.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaochen Wang ◽  
Suzana Almoosawi ◽  
Luigi Palla

Time of eating is associated with diabetes and obesity but little is known about less healthy foods and specific time of their intake over the 24 h of the day. In this study, we aimed to identify potential relationships between foods and their eating time and to see whether these associations may vary by diabetes status. The National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) including 6,802 adults (age ≥ 19 years old) collected 749,026 food recordings by a 4-day-diary. The contingency table cross-classifying 60 food groups with 7 pre-defined eating time slots (6–9 a.m., 9 a.m.–12 p.m., 12–2 p.m., 2–5 p.m., 8–10 p.m., 10 p.m.–6 a.m.) was analyzed by Correspondence Analysis (CA). CA biplots were generated for all adults and separately by diabetes status (self-reported, pre-diabetes, undiagnosed-diabetes, and non-diabetics) to visually explore the associations between food groups and time of eating across diabetes strata. For selected food groups, odds ratios (OR, 99% CI) were derived of consuming unhealthy foods at evening/night (8 p.m.–6 a.m.) vs. earlier time in the day, by logistic regression models with generalized estimating equations. The biplots suggested positive associations between evening/night and consumption of puddings, regular soft drinks, sugar confectioneries, chocolates, beers, ice cream, biscuits, and crisps for all adults in the UK. The OR (99% CIs) of consuming these foods at evening/night were, respectively, 1.43 (1.06, 1.94), 1.72 (1.44, 2.05), 1.84 (1.31, 2.59), 3.08 (2.62, 3.62), 7.26 (5.91, 8.92), 2.45 (1.84, 3.25), 1.90 (1.68, 2.16), and 1.49 (1.22, 1.82) vs. earlier time in the day adjusted for age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and social-economic levels. Stratified biplots found that sweetened beverages, sugar-confectioneries appeared more strongly associated with evening/night among undiagnosed diabetics. Foods consumed in the evening/night time tend to be highly processed, easily accessible, and rich in added sugar or saturated fat. Individuals with undiagnosed diabetes are more likely to consume unhealthy foods at night. Further longitudinal studies are required to ascertain the causal direction of the association between late-eating and diabetes status.


2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid A Gibson

AbstractObjectiveThis study examined the relationship between breakfast cereal consumption and non-milk extrinsic sugars (NMES) intake and the possible implications of this for caries in preschool children.MethodsData from the 1995 UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) of children aged 1.5–4.5 years were reanalysed. Four-day weighed food records and dental examinations were available on 1450 children living in private households in Britain. Children were classified by tertiles (age-adjusted) according to the proportion of energy derived from breakfast cereals, and the amount of NME sugar from cereals. There were no significant differences in social class background between any of the groups.ResultsChildren with diets high in breakfast cereals as a proportion of total energy (top third) had lower proportional intakes of NMES, compared with low consumers of cereals (lowest third). Consumption of sweetened cereals was positively associated with NMES intake. However, caries experience was unrelated to breakfast cereal consumption, whether presweetened or not.ConclusionsAlthough presweetened cereals are relatively high in NMES, their cariogenic potential is probably minimal in the circumstances in which they are normally consumed.


Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.


Author(s):  
Pete Dale

Numerous claims have been made by a wide range of commentators that punk is somehow “a folk music” of some kind. Doubtless there are several continuities. Indeed, both tend to encourage amateur music-making, both often have affiliations with the Left, and both emerge at least partly from a collective/anti-competitive approach to music-making. However, there are also significant tensions between punk and folk as ideas/ideals and as applied in practice. Most obviously, punk makes claims to a “year zero” creativity (despite inevitably offering re-presentation of at least some existing elements in every instance), whereas folk music is supposed to carry forward a tradition (which, thankfully, is more recognized in recent decades as a subject-to-change “living tradition” than was the case in folk’s more purist periods). Politically, meanwhile, postwar folk has tended more toward a socialist and/or Marxist orientation, both in the US and UK, whereas punk has at least rhetorically claimed to be in favor of “anarchy” (in the UK, in particular). Collective creativity and competitive tendencies also differ between the two (perceived) genre areas. Although the folk scene’s “floor singer” tradition offers a dispersal of expressive opportunity comparable in some ways to the “anyone can do it” idea that gets associated with punk, the creative expectation of the individual within the group differs between the two. Punk has some similarities to folk, then, but there are tensions, too, and these are well worth examining if one is serious about testing out the common claim, in both folk and punk, that “anyone can do it.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
CIARÁN MURPHY

Abstract The Munro Review of Child Protection asserted that the English child protection system had become overly ‘defensive’, ‘bureaucratised’ and ‘standardised’, meaning that social workers were not employing their discretion in the interests of the individual child. This paper reports on the results of an ethnographic case study of one of England’s statutory child protection teams. The research sought to explore the extent of social worker discretion relative to Munro’s call for ‘radical reform’ and a move towards a more ‘child-centred’ system. Employing an iterative mixed methods design – encompassing documentary analysis, observation, focus group, questionnaire, interview and ‘Critical Realist Grounded Theory’ – the study positioned the UK Government’s prolonged policy of ‘austerity’ as a barrier to social worker discretion. This was because the policy was seen to be contributing to an increased demand for child protection services; and a related sense amongst practitioners that they were afforded insufficient time with the child to garner the requisite knowledge, necessary for discretionary behaviour. Ultimately, despite evidence of progress relative to assertions that social worker discretion had been eroded, the paper concludes that there may still be ‘more to do’ if we are to achieve the ‘child-centred’ and ‘effective’ system that Munro advocated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Piril Hepsomali ◽  
John A. Groeger

AbstractAccumulating evidence suggests that dietary interventions might have potential to be used as a strategy to protect against age-related cognitive decline and neurodegeneration, as there are associations between some nutrients, food groups, dietary patterns, and some domains of cognition. In this study, we aimed to conduct the largest investigation of diet and cognition to date, through systematically examining the UK Biobank (UKB) data to find out whether dietary quality and food groups play a role on general cognitive ability. This cross-sectional population-based study involved 48,749 participants. UKB data on food frequency questionnaire and cognitive function were used. Also, healthy diet, partial fibre intake, and milk intake scores were calculated. Adjusted models included age, sex, and BMI. We observed associations between better general cognitive ability and higher intakes of fish, and unprocessed red meat; and moderate intakes of fibre, and milk. Surprisingly, we found that diet quality, vegetable intake, high and low fibre and milk intake were inversely associated with general cognitive ability. Our results suggest that fish and unprocessed red meat and/or nutrients that are found in fish and unprocessed red meat might be beneficial for general cognitive ability. However, results should be interpreted in caution as the same food groups may affect other domains of cognition or mental health differently. These discrepancies in the current state of evidence invites further research to examine domain-specific effects of dietary patterns/food groups on a wide range of cognitive and affective outcomes with a special focus on potential covariates that may have an impact on diet and cognition relationship.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document