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The purpose of this study was to describe the content of food advertisements broadcast during prime‐time network programs and determine what changes have occurred over the last 30 years. The sample comprised foods advertisements (N = 38, N = 31, N = 91, N = 105, N = 108) from 1971, 1977, 1988, 1992 and 1998, respectively. Of the commercials shown in 1977, 1988, 1992 and 1998, 31, 35, 20, and 15 per cent, respectively, were for food advertisements (data were unavailable for 1971). Using simple linear regression, the hourly rate for total commercials is increasing significantly (p = 0.04) by 1.4 commercials per hour each year. However, the hourly rate for food advertisements is not changing over time in a statistically significant fashion. There is very strong evidence of an association between the type of food advertised and year (chi‐square = 62.691, p < 0.001). The top four categories contributing to the chi‐square are: restaurants, low‐nutrient beverages, protein‐rich foods, and breads and cereals which, together, account for 75 per cent of the chi‐square value. For the past three decades, the “prime‐time diet” has comprised mostly low nutrient density foods that are promoted by slender, healthy actors.

Eating away from home frequency is increasing and is linked with numerous adverse health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to inform the development of health promotion materials for improving eating away from home behaviors by elucidating related parent and child cognitions.

Parents (n=37) and children (n=35; ages 6–11 years) participated in focus group discussions, based on social cognitive theory. Data were content analyzed to detect themes.

Many parents were concerned about what children ate away from home, however, others were less concerned because these occasions were infrequent. Lack of time and busy schedules were the most common barriers to eating fewer meals away from home. The greatest barrier to ensuring children ate healthfully away from home was parents were not present to monitor children’s intake. To overcome this, parents supervised what kids packed for lunch, provided caregivers instruction on foods to provide, and taught kids to make healthy choices. Kids understood that frequently eating away from home resulted in less healthful behaviors. Barriers for kids to eat healthy when away from home were tempting foods and eating in places with easy access to less healthy food. Kids reported they could take responsibility by requesting healthy foods and asking parents to help them eat healthfully away from home by providing healthy options and guidance.

This study is one of the first to qualitatively analyze parent and child eating away from home cognitions. It provides insights for tailoring nutrition education interventions to be more responsive to these audiences’ needs.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of Ninja Kitchen, a food safety educational video game, on middle school students' food safety knowledge, psychographic characteristics, and usual and intended behaviors.

The experimental group (n=903) completed the following activities about one week apart from each other: pretest, played the game, posttest, and follow‐up test. The control group (n=365) completed the same activities at similar intervals but did not have access to the game until after the follow‐up test.

Linear mixed‐effects models, controlling for gender, grade, and geographic location revealed significant time by group effects for knowledge of safe cooking temperatures for animal proteins and danger zone hazard prevention, and usual produce washing behaviors. Pairwise comparisons, adjusted for multiple comparisons, indicated that after playing the game, the experimental group felt more susceptible to foodborne illness, had stronger attitudes toward the importance of handling food safely and handwashing, had greater confidence in their ability to practice safe food handling, and had greater intentions to practice handwashing and safe food handling. Teachers and students found the game highly acceptable.

The game has the potential to promote positive food safety behaviors among youth, in a fun and educational format.

Little is known about interrelationships among nutrition knowledge, attitude, dietary intake, and body satisfaction, which are important variables that play a role in nutrition education interventions. This paper aims to focus on these interrelationships.

Students (n=279; 20.12±1.75SD years) enrolled at a large northeastern US university took an online survey. The survey contained a nutrition knowledge scale, attitude scale, food frequency scales, body areas satisfaction subscale, and demographic characteristics questions. To determine relationships, correlation coefficients were computed, along with forward stepwise regression to identify predictors of each study measure.

Data were collected from a non‐probability sample in one geographical area at one time point.

In males, significant positive correlations were found between fruit/vegetable servings and attitudes, knowledge, body satisfaction; and between knowledge and attitudes. Stepwise multiple regression analysis found fruit/vegetable servings and percent calories from fat significantly predicted attitudes, while in females attitude was a significant predictor variable for knowledge, fruit/vegetable servings, and percent of calories from fat. Among females, significant positive correlations occurred between attitudes and knowledge, and fruit/vegetable servings and attitudes.

Nutrition and health interventions should incorporate lessons that work to improve one's attitudes toward nutrition. Interventions targeted to males should aim to increase nutrition knowledge, while interventions targeted to females should focus on nutrition knowledge and attitudes.

This paper expands on what is known about young adults and key cognitive factors that influence their nutrition knowledge, attitudes, dietary intake, and body satisfaction. Nutrition educators can utilize the study findings to inform future nutrition interventions.

Mobile Universal Product Code (UPC), or barcode, scanning technology provides an efficient, accurate and comprehensive method for conducting home food inventories intended to describe the household's nutrient supply. However, heretofore this technology has had limited use in research because of equipment and software complexities. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to describe a data collection system that overcame these complexities.

A data collection system was developed that utilized off‐the‐shelf barcode scanners and laptop computers running commercial diet analysis software modified to use two large databases linking UPCs with nutrient data in addition to usual data sources (e.g. USDA Standard Reference). This system was designed for use at the data collection site to ensure 100 percent verification that scanned UPCs on food packages matched database foods and make corrections as needed. This system also permitted researchers to capture the presence of foods lacking standard UPCs (e.g. fresh produce) using a keyword search. To ensure that all data were collected uniformly and new foods not in the original database were added to the database in the same fashion, a protocol flowchart consisting of a series of branching “yes/no” questions was developed and applied to each food of interest in the household.

The system was used to conduct household food inventories of 160 families with widely varying socioeconomic strata and races/ethnicities. Households had between 13 and 389 foods on hand, the vast majority of which were identified by standard UPCs. The average inventory took approximately two hours. Study participants expressed interest in the data collection method and were very cooperative.

Home food inventories conducted by researchers are objective and help minimize reporting errors and social desirability bias; however, the cost (e.g. researcher time, equipment, software, and database licensing) of conducting home food inventories, even using mobile UPC scanning technology, is important to consider. To improve access to databases linking UPCs and nutrients, collaborative links between researchers and industry are needed.

This paper is among the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using mobile barcode scanning technology to conduct home food inventories on a large‐scale basis and solve the technical problems associated with this data collection methodology.

This study evaluated and compared the abilities of women (n = 50) between the ages of 25 and 45 residing in the UK to locate and manipulate information on nutrition labels prepared in accordance with US regulations (i.e. Nutrition Facts labels) and those prepared in accordance with the EU Directive and UK Food Labelling Regulations 1996. It also assessed their ability to assess the accuracy of nutrient content claims. Study findings indicate that the women could locate and manipulate information on both labels equally well. However, they were significantly more able to assess nutrient content claims using the Nutrition Facts label. The research findings suggest EU labelling changes that may facilitate consumer use of labels in making dietary planning decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine key determinants (i.e. knowledge, perceived susceptibility, attitudes, confidence, behavioral intentions) associated with practicing health-protective behaviors that could inform development of programs and strategies for improving food handling behaviors of middle school youth.

Middle schoolers (n=1,102; 50 percent boys) completed a questionnaire with the following topics: demographics, food safety knowledge, usual food safety behaviors, perceived susceptibility to foodborne illness, attitude toward food safety, confidence (self-efficacy) in practicing safe food handling procedures, and intended safe food handling behaviors.

Middle schoolers had insufficient food safety knowledge ( _˜50 percent incorrect responses) even though most reported washing their hands before making a snack and washing fruits and vegetables before eating them. Spearman correlation analyses indicated that food safety knowledge and perceived susceptibility to foodborne illness was weakly correlated (r _s≤0.18) and in some instances not significantly correlated with actual behaviors, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions. Attitudes, behavioral intentions, and self-efficacy were key determinants that were significantly and highly correlated (r _s<0.70) with each other. Additionally, knowing when to wash hands was significantly correlated (r _s≤0.13) with actual handwashing behaviors, and attitudes, behavioral intentions, and self-efficacy whereas knowing how to wash hands was not.

Food safety interventions for youth should aim to increase knowledge, challenge perceptions of susceptibility to foodborne illness, and motivate adoption of new safe food handling behaviors, while supporting their already positive food safety attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions.

Watching television has become one of the most time‐consuming leisure activities of children in many nations. Television offers numerous opportunities to learn and be entertained, but can conbribute to a variety of public health concerns for youth. Thus, it is vital for health professionals to become aware of the types of health‐related messages (HRMs) broadcast on television. The purpose of this study was to content‐analyze the HRMs in a widely viewed, popular prime‐time program, The Simpsons, which is exported around the world and is rich in HRMs. Overall, nearly 40 percent of the HRMs on The Simpsons run counter to those promoted by health professionals. However, there were positive HRMs promoting practices recommended by health‐care professionals, such as choosing nutritious foods and eating together as a family. Future research should investigate how HRMs impact children's health knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.

Advertising can affect health‐related behaviors of young adults. However, little is known about this environmental influence on college campuses. The purpose of this paper is to create an inventory for assessing health‐related advertisements and use it to assess advertising on/near the campus of a major Northeastern university.

The inventory was developed from existing instruments, input from experts, and data collected from student focus groups. The instrument was pilot tested, refined, and used by three trained data collectors (inter‐rater reliability =87.5 percent) to assess the advertising in academic buildings (n=10), residence halls (n=3), libraries (n=2), recreation centers (n=3), student centers (n=2), dining halls (n=3), bookstores (n=2), bus stops (n=4), campus student listserves, and retail stores adjacent to campus.

Of the 130 advertisements, most common types were related to diet/nutrition (41.5 percent) and exercise/fitness (14.6 percent). An evaluation of advertising message polarity revealed 61.5 percent promoted positive health behaviors. Negative messages were mostly related to branded diet/nutrition ads (26 percent). Health‐related advertising on/near this university's campus mostly promoted good health practices in accordance to the university policies. However, improvements in developing university policies with regard to branded diet/nutrition ads on campus are warranted.

The study described in this paper was conducted at one time point at a single university. Future studies should examine seasonal variations and the usefulness of this instrument on other college campuses.

This valid data collection tool will be of benefit to other college campuses and policy makers who wish to identify how to improve campus‐related advertising policies to ensure they promote positive health behaviors.

The purpose of this study was to explore the usefulness of a simplified version of cognitive response analysis (CRA) as a formative evaluation tool for health education materials developed for small, unfunded projects.

A group of women (n=15), aged between 25 and 50 years, provided cognitive responses (CRs) that communicated their ongoing thoughts after viewing each slide in a narrated, online slide presentation that focused on nutrient content claims. Participants were assigned in a systematic random fashion to one of three CRA variations. In all three variations, participants simultaneously saw a slide and heard its narration and then provided their CRs while still viewing the slide. In Variation 1, a researcher wrote participants' CRs on a log sheet (n=5). Variation 2 participants' audiotaped their CRs which were later transcribed by a researcher (n=5). Variation 3 participants wrote their CRs on a log sheet. To assess the quality and usefulness of the CRs generated by each variation, the researchers categorized each CR into content‐related categories.

The time and effort required by the researcher and participants for all three variations of collecting CRs was similar. However, transcribing the audiotaped CRs presented a greater time burden to the researcher. Analysis of variance revealed that Variation 3 generated significantly fewer CRs than the other two variations. In addition, CRs from those in Variation 3 tended to be shorter and less specific and were less useful in refining the presentation because they provided limited guidance on needed improvements. In contrast, the CRs generated by Variations 1 and 2 were judged to be more useful in identifying improvements that could optimize the value of the presentation.

The results suggest that a simplified version of CRA is a valuable, efficient, and low‐cost tool for formative evaluation of health education materials.