Nutrition
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Review
Assessment of body composition: Intrinsic methodological limitations and statistical pitfalls.
Evaluation of body composition (BC) is crucial for an adequate assessment of nutritional status and its alterations, to ensure the optimal tailoring of nutritional therapies during several pathologic conditions. The need for feasible and reliable methods for BC measurement, which could be applied either in healthcare across the lifespan as well as in clinical research and epidemiologic studies, has led to the development of various techniques. Unfortunately, they have not always produced equivalent results due to the fact that they are based on completely different principles or suffer intrinsic biases related to specific conditions. ⋯ Finally, the need to compare the data obtained by new techniques to a reference standard has produced a further bias, due to a systematic misinterpretation of the statistical methods in the attempt to correlate the various techniques. In this context, the most used statistical methods for the comparison between different techniques have been Pearson's correlation test, the more recent intraclass correlation coefficient, Lin's concordance correlation coefficient method, and the Bland-Altman analysis. The aim of this review was to offer a summary of the methods that are mostly used in clinical practice to measure BC with the intent to give appropriate suggestions when statistical methods are used to interpret data, and underline pitfalls and limitations.
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Nutrition labels advise consumers about the nutritional value of packaged foods and their contribution to the overall composition of the diet. They have been proposed as an instrument for the promotion of healthy diets and as a fundamental tool in the prevention of obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). ⋯ Although nutrition science investigates individual foods or nutrients, when communicating to the public most of the significant evidence of the favorable health effect largely depends on dietary patterns and not on a single food component or individual nutrient. Therefore, we suggest that a new tool based on positive communication should be developed and implemented to highlight the importance of the diet as a complex matrix.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Dietary recommendations for fasting days in an alternate-day intermittent fasting pattern: A randomized controlled trial.
The aims of this study were to explore the safety and effectiveness of alternate-day fasting in Chinese people and to compare weight loss outcomes and safety when consuming a high-protein (HP) versus a normal protein (NP) diet versus a nutritional meal replacement (MR) on fasting days. ⋯ ADF is an effective, short-term weight loss strategy that was tolerated by most Chinese participants. We suggest that dietary patterns during fasting days is less important, and that calorie restriction during those days should be the focus.
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Missed nutrients from skipped meals affect diet quality. However, the extent to which breakfast skipping affects the inflammatory potential of a diet, as indicated by Children's Dietary Inflammatory Index (C-DII) score, remains unknown. We aimed to evaluate the association between breakfast skipping and C-DII score, and investigate the presence of interaction with sociodemographic factors and sedentary behavior. ⋯ Breakfast skipping was associated with a more proinflammatory diet in school-age children, and there was significant interaction with sedentary behavior. Early childhood interventions encouraging the habit of eating a breakfast and engaging in physical activity may help reduce the dietary inflammatory potential and prevent related cardiometabolic disorders.