Search results

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of spatial modeling in adolescent and under-five children’s nutritional status.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The indicator used to identify spatial autocorrelation is the Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA). LISA is a method of exploratory analysis of spatial data capable of detecting spatial relationships at the local level and its effects globally. Aplication of stochastic modeling in spatial nutrition identification mapping can be categorized into two cases based on spatial autocorrelation and non-spatial autocorrelation.

Findings – This results of this study indicate that there is no spatial autocorrelation in the adolescent nutritional dataset. The thematic map for anemia showed that that the highest number of anemia in adolescents was in KutaAlam sub-districts (48 people). Sub-districts that were second most common were Meuraxa, Jaya Baru, and Baiturrahman sub-districts. The fewest cases were found in Lueng Bata sub-district (12 people). There were no sub-districts affected by neighboring areas, in the case of adolescents’ anemia in Banda Aceh. For the under-five nutritional data set, it shows that there are four factors that significantly affect spatial influence, which are malnutrition, chronic energy deficiency, woman of child-bearing age, proportion of family planning, percentage of households with PHBS and coverage of access to clean water.

Research Limitations/Implications – Anemia data were obtained with a school-based survey. Household survey would be better to implement in spatial analysis.

Practical Implications – The comparison of the dataset with the two methods provides a simple example to implement special autocorrelation in practice.

Social Implications – The results contribute to a much better comparison in many cases in the nutritional field.

Originality/Value – This is the initial nutritional status of adolescents in Banda Aceh.

The purpose of this analysis is to determine the impact of various factors, including population growth, income growth, and research and development on food security. This chapter also seeks to better understand the role of relative food prices in consumers’ selection of foods to meet their nutritional needs.

We utilize a welfare economic framework to provide a theoretical examination of the impact of various factors (including income growth, population growth, and research and development) on food security among the poor. A minimum nutritional diet is specified as a baseline for the evaluation of these scenarios.

Scenarios show the impacts that income, population growth, and research and development have on food security through their price and quantity impacts. Also, we highlight the difficulty in formulating an optimal diet that meets the recommended dietary requirements for only calories and protein, as different foods contain calories, proteins, and micronutrients in differing proportions. This indicates that changes in relative food prices will often alter consumers’ nutrient intake with respect to the minimum nutritional diet.

Research and development is critical in guaranteeing food availability. Trade-based, production-based, and own-labor entitlements are key factors in determining food security. Consumption subsidies and income supplements can be used to assist those who do not have entitlements sufficient to meet their minimum nutritional diet.

This study uses migrant household survey data from 2008 to 2009 to examine how parental migration decisions are associated with the nutritional status of children in rural and urban China. Results from instrumental variables regressions show a substantial adverse effect of children’s exposure to parental migration on height-for-age Z scores of left-behind children relative to children who migrate with their parents. Additional results from a standard Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, a quantile decomposition, and a counterfactual distribution analysis all confirm that children who are left behind in rural villages – usually because of the oppressive hukou system – have poorer nutritional status than children who migrate with their parents, and the gaps are biggest at lower portions of the distribution.

School-aged children living in Montgomery and Troy located in Central Alabama are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. This study used a one-group pre-test–post-test research design to investigate if gardening and nutritional activities could be used as effective intervention to reduce levels of food insecurity among school-aged children. Statistical results found that several of the participants live in urban food deserts. Food insecurity scores were higher for participants in Montgomery compared to those in Troy, AL. The relationship between parental income, household size, and location were important indicators for measuring food insecurity among participants. Recommendations for future research include expanding the scope of study to different sites and climates with larger samples to enhance our understanding of gardening and nutritional educational activities on food insecurity among school-aged children.

In this chapter, we explore the future global supply and demand trends for key agricultural products under baseline assumptions of socioeconomic changes in population and income. We examine nutritional trends under this baseline to highlight countries that lag behind in attaining key dietary sufficiency targets.

Using a global multimarket agricultural model, we disaggregate the key macronutrients within food commodities to understand how progress toward target dietary intake levels of nutrients compares across various regions. We look particularly at those regions whose populations fall into the bottom sixth of nutritional attainment (the Bottom Billion) and note their slow projected progress toward achieving dietary sufficiency in key macronutrients.

Many countries falling into the Bottom Billion category of nutritional attainment are in Africa and Asia. Colombia is the only Latin American country that fell into this category. Most populations in the Bottom Billion are deficient in carbohydrate, protein, and fiber intake.

Policies aimed at eliminating hunger and improving the nutritional status of populations must be aligned with evolving socioeconomic patterns and changes that shape food consumption and dietary patterns. This analysis evaluates regions of the world in greatest need of attaining sufficient dietary intake of important nutrients, and sets the stage for a deeper discussion of policy options for improving these regions’ food security.

In the age of “big data,” one of the most important capabilities that differentiates the winners from the losers in the intensely competitive grocery market is how successfully a firm can harness its vast amounts of shopper data to become more shopper-centric. Grocery retailers struggle with how to manage the tremendous amount of data available to them and best leverage their frequent shopper data to derive insights. These data also present an opportunity for academic research on decision-making and evaluation of strategic initiatives. This chapter discusses three case studies that illustrate the various capabilities of frequent shopper data in generating shopper insights. Specifically, using frequent shopper data for millions of shoppers, the three case studies demonstrate how frequent shopper data can be used as an important information asset for understanding differences and similarities among different shopper groups (Case Study 1), as a means to assess the effectiveness of store redesigns/environment changes (Case Study 2), and as a key tool for evaluating program success (Case Study 3). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how successful collaboration between practitioners and academics can be a boon to both business success and academic research.

Diet therapy or nutritional therapy has become a real challenge in the fight against the increasing number of modern illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancers. The scientific community has recognized the importance of studies that will support or rebut the association of certain nutrition/energy inputs with the prevention and/or improvement of certain diseases. Patient counseling is offered by medical doctors, nutritionists and dieticians, but patients often seek additional sources of information from popular media that may not be adequately scientifically supported. Whose responsibility is it when the Diet Therapy is not an effective treatment and where does the consequent ethical and moral responsibility lie?

This chapter argues for the importance of a nutritionally educated scientist evaluating the diets that are seen to be related with the health improvement also excluding diets that are mostly related to the patients’ well-being as the Mediterranean, DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), Ketogenic and Vegetarian diet. Diet guidelines are often explained with linguistic variables (as “reduce the input of” etc.) which can be differently perceived by the end user. The interpretation if a linguistic variable is presented using the body mass index categories using a bell-shaped curve. The preferable area fits to the linguistic variable “acceptable BMI.” But also are indicated those areas which are less preferable. Those examples of information interpretations show the necessity of knowledge transfer. The quantity of information presented in diet guidelines can be experienced as a great muddle for patients; leaving them not knowing where and how to start. So, remains the ethical and moral responsibility of all links in the chain of nutritional and diet research and recommendations. Only objective and open-minded recommendations based on the latest scientific facts can gain confidence of the social, economical, and political subjects which must put the well-being of the population uppermost in their mind.

We analyze heights of Indian scouts in the U.S. army born between ca. 1825 and 1875. Their average height of ca. 170 cm (67 in.) confirms that natives were tall compared to Europeans but were nearly the shortest among the rural populations in the New World. The trend in their height describes a slightly inverted “U” shape with an increase between those born 1820–1834 and 1835–1839 of ca. 1.8 cm (0.7 in.) (p = 0.000) and a subsequent slight decline after the Civil War. This implies that they were able to maintain and perhaps even improve their nutritional status through the Civil War, though harder times followed for those born thereafter. We also recalculate the heights of Native Americans in the Boas sample and find that the Plains Indians were shorter than most rural Americans. The trend in the height of Indians in the Boas sample is similar to that of the scouts.

In Canada, food insecurity is characterized by the consumption of low quantity or low-quality foods, worrying about food supply and/or acquiring foods in socially unacceptable ways, such as begging or scavenging. As of 2012, approximately 15.2% of Ontario, Canada, children are living in food insecure households, a prevalence which has remained steady since 2005. This is particularly concerning when considering that school-aged children are a population whose growth and developing is sensitive to nutritional stress, and the experience of childhood food insecurity is highly associated with the development of adverse physical, mental and learning outcomes. This study aims at establishing the relationship between food insecurity and Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) standardized test scores in order to highlight the incompatibility of the EQAO's reliance on test outcomes in determining Ontarian school's accountability, specifically for those with a high prevalence of food insecurity.