The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome (MetS), a cluster of central obesity, hyper/dyslipiemia, hyperglycemia, and hypertension is constantly increasing worldwide. Although, the exact mechanisms underlying the development of the MetS are not completely understood, modern lifestyle of physical inactivity and unhealthy nutrition, obesity, and their interaction with genetic factors are considere...

OBJECTIVE Family functioning, which reflects how well family members communicate and interact with each other, is associated with childhood overweight and obesity, but its association with children's eating behaviors remains unclear. The aim of this study was to examine the association between family functioning and unhealthy food and beverage consumption among children ages 1 to 12 y old. ME...

The importance of the gut and the soil microbiomes as determinants of human and ecosystem health, respectively, is gaining rapid acceptation in the medical and ecological literatures. This suggests that there is a wealth of highly transferable knowledge about the microbial ecology of human and non-human ecosystems that is currently being generated in parallel, but mostly in isolation from one a...

PURPOSE There is a growing awareness of the potent ways in which the wellbeing of physicians impacts the health of their patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate the health behaviors, care needs and attitudes towards self-prescription of Dutch medical students, and any differences between junior preclinical and senior clinically active students. METHODS All students (n = 2695) o...

OBJECTIVE To assess the possible associations between physical activity, diet, social state and overweight in children. DESIGN Cross-sectional study on 1468 children aged between 5 and 7 years old in Kiel, northwest Germany. METHODS Assessment of physical activity and social factors by a questionnaire, food frequency record, body composition analysis by anthropometrics and bioelectrical imp...

Adopting a healthier lifestyle includes replacing long-standing unhealthy eating habits with new ones and maintaining these newly acquired healthy habits. A permanent behavior change appears to be difficult maintain, which may follow from some basic learning processes. In the last decades, lot was learned about mechanisms that promote relapse into old behaviours. Taking processes consideration,...

The text analyses critically the polarity between discourses about healthy life styles and the sedentariness in the context of new technologies for health information research and dissemination. We argue that the techno-scientific rationality has grown an 'economy of trues' which, on the perspective of conducting to safe life styles, has prescribed a normative ideal of self discipline which ten...