There is an increasing policy commitment to address the avoidable burdens of unhealthy diet, overweight and obesity. However, to design effective policies, it is important to understand why people make unhealthy dietary choices. Research from behavioural economics suggests a critical role for time discounting, which describes how people's value of a reward, such as better health, decreases with...

BACKGROUND Healthy dietary patterns are a global priority to reduce non-communicable diseases. Yet neither worldwide patterns of diets nor their trends with time are well established. We aimed to characterise global changes (or trends) in dietary patterns nationally and regionally and to assess heterogeneity by age, sex, national income, and type of dietary pattern. METHODS In this systematic...

In the current dietary recommendations for the treatment and prevention of Type 2 diabetes and its related complications, there is flexibility in the proportion of energy derived from monounsaturated fat and carbohydrate as a replacement for saturated fat. Over the last few years, several population studies have shown that subjects eating a lot of refined grains and processed foods have a much ...

BACKGROUND Price and affordability of foods are important determinants of health. Targeted food pricing policies may help improve population diets. However, methods producing comparable data to inform relevant policy decisions are lacking in Australia and globally. The objective was to develop and pilot standardised methods to assess the price, relative price and affordability of healthy (recom...

P.O. Box 1 3720 BA Bilthoven The Netherlands www.rivm.nl/en Our food, our health Healthy and unhealthy diets receive a lot of attention nowadays, and there are good reasons for this. Each year, overweight and unfavourable dietary composition account for thousands of new cases of illness and unnecessary deaths. The number of young people and adults who are overweight is increasing. Foodborne inf...

The concern over increasing rates of obesity and associated health issues has led to calls for solutions to the potentially unhealthy influence of television and food advertising on children's diets. Research demonstrates that children's food preferences are acquired through learning processes, and that these preferences have long-lasting effects on diet. We examined food preferences and eating...

PURPOSE To evaluate adolescents' perception of the causes of obesity, with emphasis on differences according to nutritional status and socioeconomic position. METHODS We conducted qualitative research including 80 adolescents belonging to the 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) Birth Cohort Study, and their mothers. We classified adolescent boys and girls into four groups (girls-obese, girls-eutrophic, boy...

OBJECTIVE To identify the correlates of the home food environment (parents' intake, availability and food-related parenting practices) at the age of 10 years with dietary patterns during childhood and in adolescence. SETTING Primary-school children of fifty-nine Flemish elementary schools completed a questionnaire at school in 2002. Four years later they completed a questionnaire by e-mail or...