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The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer thinking about nutrition decisions and how firms can use consumers’ awareness of the links between nutrients and health generated by public health messages to market products, including ones, which have little nutritional value. We approach this issue by tracking the development of public health messages based on scientific research, dissemination of those messages in the popular press, and use of nutrition claims in food advertisements to assess whether firms are timing the use of nutrition claims to take advantage of heuristic-based decision-making. Our findings suggest that the timing of the development of nutrition information, its dissemination in the press, and use in advertising accords well with a heuristic processing model in which firms take advantage of associations between nutrient information and health in their advertisements. However, the demonstrated relationships may not be causal. Further research will be needed to provide stronger and more comprehensive evidence regarding the proposed message hijacking process. If the message hijacking framework is borne out: (1) simple overall health rating scales could significantly improve consumer decision-making, (2) the impact of misleading advertisements could be mitigated by encouraging a multidimensional view of nutrition, and (3) more intensive regulation of product labeling could limit the impact of hijacked messages.

Overall, this paper considers a novel hypothesis about the impact of public health messages on nutrition and health.

This chapter focuses on the healthy lifestyle desideratum stretching out of the public policy realm to become a business interest in established and emerging economies. It is argued that retailers, through their marketing and social responsibility strategies, evolve into promoters of a healthy lifestyle at both social and individual levels. The selected examples from Poland illustrate how food retailers, particularly fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailers, respond to the healthy lifestyle desideratum within an emerging economy.

A qualitative approach is taken. The role and potential activities of retailers to promote a healthy lifestyle are identified by theoretical studies. Then, retailers’ involvement in developing the ‘health and wellness’ market segment as a market opportunity is justified by analyses of competitive trends in Polish retailing. The marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of leading Polish retailers (representatives of different organisational forms) contributing to the development of a healthy lifestyle are presented. Data are drawn from companies’ web pages, interviews, magazines and research agencies.

Recent experience in Poland confirms the finding from previous research that the retail sector in emerging economies is rapidly progressing towards catching up with well-established practices in developed countries. On the demand side, this process is fostered by the rise of middle-class consumers, while on the supply side, the key driver is the fierce competition among international chains and domestic distributors.

Examples drawn from Polish retailing represent good business practices, the relevance of which stretches beyond their local context and renders these business practices shareable.

Awareness is raised of the importance of progressing towards a healthy lifestyle; pragmatic advice is provided on how retailers from an emerging economy can enable changes in consumers’ behaviour.

The business focus on healthy lifestyle development fills a knowledge gap since health science perspectives still prevail in mainstream research on the topic.

Nutrition, as a science, is poorly understood, both professionally and publicly. The confusion that surrounds this science makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to formulate public health policy, which creates opportunities for political manipulation and control. Nutrition, for a century or more, has been variously described as a summation of the physiological and biochemical properties of individual nutrients in food rather than the whole food itself. This infers that isolated nutrients in supplements will function in the same way as nutrients in food. It also infers that removing or minimizing “undesirable” nutrients from food will make the food more healthful. This arises from the highly reductionist way that we focus on individual nutrients minus their natural context, both the context within the foods of which they are a part and the context within biological systems where they function. The shortcomings of this belief system may be illustrated by hugely costly mistakes made in the past, even more than a century ago, that corrupt current practices. Such mistakes have become so embedded in the contemporary narrative on nutritional science, both fundamentally and practically, that we fail to recognize the damage they continue to cause.

Alternatively, when nutritional effects are considered more within their natural contexts, that is, more wholistically, then it helps to explain, for example, the remarkable ability of nutrition, as provided by a whole food plant-based diet, to prevent even to cure varied types of cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, the breadth of this nutritional effect for a wide variety of illnesses and diseases suggests that nutrition, properly provided by a whole food plant-based diet, is more efficacious than a combination of all the contemporary pills and procedures combined. It also suggests that genetic determinism is not the explanation for disease that is widely advanced. And finally, among still more consequences, there are many societal outcomes that can be substantially mitigated, including the escalating cost of health care and the dangerously increasing array of destructive practices that damage the environment. Many of the momentous health, economic, environmental and sociopolitical problems currently faced may be traced to a misunderstanding of the effects of food and nutrition. The task therefore is how to bring this message to the attention of a public who for too long have gradually adopted flawed food production and healthcare systems that are on the verge of collapse, threatening the collapse of entire societies as we know them. More specifically, a public and professional dialog on the meaning of nutrition, especially its wholistic properties, is desperately needed, especially in medical schools where nutrition as a science is almost totally ignored.

The cruise sector promotes itself as a responsible steward of the ocean environment and claims its policies and practices protect the marine ecology. As such, it would argue that its activities do not significantly contribute to global warming and climate change. However, there is disconnect between what the cruise sector says it does and what cruiseships actually do in relation to the environment. This chapter looks at the sector's environmental practices and how it contributes to climate change. This is both directly through greenhouse gases and indirectly through degradation of the marine environment, as well as the prospects for the sector to voluntarily take responsibility for its part of the problem. Despite a poor record on voluntary efforts, the chapter calls on the cruise sector to embrace initiatives that bring its behavior in line with its public pronouncements about environmental responsibility.

This chapter explores the development of advertising regulations governing food advertising to children in Australia since the 1940s. By introducing the advertising and marketing self-regulatory system, the Australian Government is taking a neoliberal approach, advocating for the free market to initiate and sustain the country’s economic development, instead of greater government regulation. By examining the primary and secondary literature, such as government reports and research, and newspaper and academic articles, this chapter outlines different regulatory initiatives adopted by both the government and food industry to limit food and beverage advertising to children on television and online, in order to prevent obesity rates increasing in children. This chapter synthesizes and critically evaluates food industry and public health studies, government and non-government reviews, and other research studies to evaluate the influence of self-regulation on Australian television food advertising within the neoliberal context since the 1990s. It contributes to the literature on food advertising regulations for children in Australia by offering evidence of how the government, public health authorities and the food industry have attempted to keep pace with changes in the advertising, marketing and media industries by developing and reviewing advertising codes. It identifies the loopholes that exist in these self-regulatory codes and concludes that Australia’s current advertising regulatory arrangements are failing to protect our children from unhealthy food marketing on television, especially on relatively under-regulated online platforms such as social media and branded websites. The issues identified in this chapter could aid the food and beverage industry, as well as the self-regulatory system, to offer comprehensive and applicable solutions to combat Australia’s obesity crises by implementing new legislations that align with different marketing practices.

In every industry there are resources. Some are moving, others more fixed; some are technical, others social. People working with the resources, for example, as buyers or sellers, or users or producers, may not make much notice of them. A product sells. A facility functions. The business relationship in which we make our money has “always” been there. However, some times this picture of order is disturbed. A user having purchased a product for decades may “suddenly” say to the producer that s/he does not appreciate the product. And a producer having received an order of a product that s/he thought was well known, may find it impossible to sell it. Such disturbances may be ignored. Or they can be used as a platform for development. In this study we investigate the latter option, theoretically and through real world data. Concerning theory we draw on the industrial network approach. We see industrial actors as part of (industrial) networks. In their activities actors use and produce resources. Moreover, the actors interact − bilaterally and multilaterally. This leads to development of resources and networks. Through “thick” descriptions of two cases we illustrate and try to understand the interactive character of resource development and how actors do business on features of resources. The cases are about a certain type of resource, a product − goat milk. The main message to industrial actors is that they should pay attention to that products can be co-created. Successful co-creation of products, moreover, may require development also of business relationships and their connections (“networking”).

Scientists are constructing knowledge about global warming by adapting evidence-based disciplines to reflect the Precautionary Principle. It is equally important to communicate the complexities and uncertainties underpinning global warming because inappropriate vehicles for giving accounts could result in defensive decisions that perpetuate the business-as-usual mindset: the method of communication affects how the risk associated with global warming is socialised. Appropriately constructed accounts should facilitate reflective communicative action. Here Beck's theorisation of risk society, Luhmann's sociological theory of risk and Gandhi's vehicle of communicative action (or satyagraha) are used to construct a risk-based accountability mechanism, whilst providing insight into Schumacher's concept of total accountability. These accountability constructs will be illustrated through the lived experiences of South Australian citrus horticulturists in the context of a richly layered narrative of competing discourses about global warming. The reiterative process of theory informing practice is used to construct a couple of dialogical vehicles of accountability.

Recent publications, including Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009) and A New Biology for the 21st Century (National Research Council, 2009), highlight needed changes for undergraduate science education. These include a shift away from traditionally structured lab courses toward more authentic scientific inquiry experiences in undergraduate science laboratories. The aim of these reform initiatives is for students to develop not only conceptual understanding of the big ideas of science but also the skills required to conduct an investigation and an understanding of science as a human process of constructing scientific knowledge (National Research Council, 2011). The work that we describe here examines the challenges and successes of engaging nonscience majors in a large introductory university-level science course in conducting scientific inquiry. To understand the course structure and the nature of the laboratory experiences, we describe two different lab experiences. In both cases, students engaged in guided inquiry and then were asked to engage in a more open-ended inquiry experience. Our findings suggest that students need significant scaffolding to make the transition from more guided inquiry to more open-ended inquiry.

This chapter highlights how implementing circular economy principles can help companies working with sustainability to move from a reductionist and waste management approach to marketing competitive circular value propositions that intentionally design out waste (e.g. emissions and pollution) by rethinking, reinventing and redesigning the value chain. Schijvens, a Dutch family-owned corporate fashion textile company, acts as a case for exemplifying successful implementation of circular economy principles as a marketing strategy in a sector that struggles with finding solutions to the ethical challenges of producing and marketing textile fashion. The textile industry has, for many years, been accused of production that is based on environmentally harmful processes and conditions that are not socially fair. Circular economy principles provide a range of suggestions to address the ethical challenges occurring from covering the human needs of having clothes to wear. Yet, implementing circular economy principles is not a panacea. It is not only a question of delivering a technological quick fix but also a question of managing the new processes and human mindset guiding the actions in the value chain. This chapter, therefore, outlines reasons for a different perspective on the traditional linear value chain and related implications managers face when undertaking a journey from sustainability based on a reductionist approach to a closed-loop approach. It is argued that implementing circular economy principles by pro-actively managing the value chain processes based on eco-centric dynamic capabilities can provide even more radical changes than the incremental reductionist approach often associated with being a green sustainable company.