BACKGROUND While tobacco use reduction remains a major public health goal, little evidence exists on how citizens in North Carolina view policy issues related to tobacco control. This research examines attitudes toward tobacco policies among North Carolina parents. METHODS Randomly selected North Carolina adults with a child living in his or her household were invited to participate in the Ch...

Humans are the only animals to cook their food before eating it. Some evidence indicates that cooked food allowed the human brain and body to develop amazing complexities due to increased access to varieties of food and time. Others believe that the humans who cooked their first meal 40,000 years ago took a step towards a long fall from grace that eventually led to fast food, heart disease, and...

It is widely accepted today that the media have contributed to the increase in childhood obesity. Google ‘children’ and ‘obesity’, and you would think that the media’s role in giving rise to obesity is a foregone conclusion. Much of the blame is pinned on television in particular: that medium is said to make children, who watch too much of it, sedentary and inactive compared to earlier generati...

Background The stress of raising a child with food allergies affects each family differently, depending, in large part, on how the physician initially presents the information and the family’s coping style. Based on how the information is presented they can leave the doctor’s office terrified and unsure whether they will be able to prevent the next reaction, or concerned but confident that they...

Humans are the only animals to cook their food before eating it. Some evidence indicates that cooked food allowed the human brain and body to develop amazing complexities due to increased access to varieties of food and time. Others believe that the humans who cooked their first meal 40,000 years ago took a step towards a long fall from grace that eventually led to fast food, heart disease, and...

137 Should Ronald McDonald Be Forced to Retire? Austin Duong Abstract The paper focuses on the ethics and politics of the advertisements from fast food companies, particularly McDonald’s toward young children as consumers. It looks at various means and strategies of advertising designed specifically to children and the effect of advertising toward childhood obesity and diet choices. Using vario...

We analyze the effect of the number of fast food restaurants at different distances from public schools in Arkansas on school-level obesity rates. We use instrumental variable estimation with fast-food restaurant proximity being instrumented by proportion of the population within the 15 to 24 year-old age group and nearness of the school to major highways. Although we find no consistent statist...

Humans are the only animals to cook their food before eating it. Some evidence indicates that cooked food allowed the human brain and body to develop amazing complexities due to increased access to varieties of food and time. Others believe that the humans who cooked their first meal 40,000 years ago took a step towards a long fall from grace that eventually led to fast food, heart disease, and...

INTRODUCTION Application of system thinking to the development, implementation and evaluation of childhood obesity prevention efforts represents the cutting edge of community-based prevention. We report on an approach to developing a system oriented community perspective on the causes of obesity. METHODS Group model building sessions were conducted in a rural Australian community to address i...

OBJECTIVE Previous studies have established that acculturation is associated with dietary intake among Mexican immigrants and their offspring, but few studies have investigated whether food purchasing, food preparation or food-related values act as mechanisms of dietary acculturation. We examine the relationship between language use and a wide range of food behaviours and food-related values am...