Recent human population increase has been enabled by a massive expansion of global agricultural production. A key component of this "Green Revolution" has been application of inorganic fertilizers to produce and maintain high crop yields. However, the long-term sustainability of these practices is unclear given the eutrophying effects of fertilizer runoff as well as the reliance of fertilizer p...

Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Abstract Despite the significant rise in obesity in the U.S., economic research on obesity is still in its infancy. This paper employs a microeconomic approach to investigate the effects of price and income changes on weight in an effort to ...

Food and health security in North East Asia including South Korea, North Korea, China and Japan was compared. Because this region contains countries with many complex problems, it is worthwhile to study the current situation. With about 24% of the world's population, all North East Asian countries supply between 2400 and 3000 Kcal of energy. Regarding health status, two extreme problems exist. ...

Recent droughts in the midwestern United States threaten to cause global catastrophe driven by a speculator amplified food price bubble. Here we show the effect of speculators on food prices using a validated quantitative model that accurately describes historical food prices. During the last six years, high and fluctuating food prices have lead to widespread hunger and social unrest. While the...

BACKGROUND Research on the built food environment and weight status has mostly focused on the presence/absence of food outlets while ignoring their internal features or where residents actually shop. We explored associations of distance travelled to supermarkets and supermarket characteristics with shoppers' body mass index (BMI). METHODS Shoppers (n=555) of five supermarkets situated in diff...

BACKGROUND Reducing health inequalities requires interventions that work as well, if not better, among disadvantaged populations. The aim of this study was to determine if the effects of price discounts and tailored nutrition education on supermarket food purchases (percentage energy from saturated fat and healthy foods purchased) vary by ethnicity, household income and education. METHOD A 2×...

It is known that the price of food influences the purchasing and consumption decisions of individuals; however, little work has examined if the price of healthier food relative to unhealthier food in an individual's neighborhood is associated with overall dietary quality while using data from multiple regions in the United States. Cross-sectional person-level data came from The Multi-Ethnic Stu...

India did not experience any food price spikes during 2007–08 when global food prices erupted. It was partly due to India’s ban on exports of wheat and common rice India resorted to. But the fiscal stimulus that the government of India provided in 2009 in the wake of G8 countries’ and other major economies’ call to avert economic recession, coupled with one of the worst droughts India experienc...