J Am Diet Assoc
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A simple, reliable, noninvasive, and easy-to-use instrument is important for successful monitoring of emerging nutrition problems in elderly people. The objectives of this study were to determine whether adoption of population-specific body mass index (BMI) cutpoints would improve the predictive ability of the short-form Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) and whether calf circumference could be an acceptable alternative to BMI in the short-form MNA without compromising its predictive ability. Using convenience sampling, the study recruited 301 community-living, 109 care center-living, and 68 nursing home-living elderly people, 65 years or older, as subjects. ⋯ These results suggest that modification of a measurement tool according to cultural or anthropometric features of the target population is necessary. The study also shows that calf circumference can be an acceptable alternative to BMI in the short-form MNA. Because measuring calf circumference is easier and less time-consuming then measuring BMI, the modified tool can make periodic nutritional screening an easier job and routine nutritional screening a more realistic goal in geriatric care.
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Multicenter Study
Health professionals' and dietetics practitioners' perceived effectiveness of fruit and vegetable parenting practices across six countries.
Fruit and vegetable intake may reduce the risk of some chronic diseases. However, many children consume less-than-recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables. Because health professionals and dietetics practitioners often work with parents to increase children's fruit and vegetable intake, assessing their opinions about the effectiveness of parenting practices is an important step in understanding how to promote fruit and vegetable intake among preschool-aged children. ⋯ The theoretically derived factor structures for effective and ineffective parenting practices were evaluated using separate confirmatory factor analyses and demonstrated acceptable fit. Fruit and vegetable intake-related parenting practices that provide external control were perceived as ineffective or counterproductive, whereas fruit and vegetable intake-related parenting practices that provided structure, nondirective control, and were responsive were perceived as effective in getting preschool-aged children to consume fruit and vegetables. Future research needs to develop and validate a parent-reported measure of these fruit and vegetable intake-related parenting practices and to empirically evaluate the effect of parental use of the parenting practices on child fruit and vegetable consumption.
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Policy that targets the school food environment has been advanced as one way to increase the availability of healthy food at schools and healthy food choice by students. Although both state- and district-level policy initiatives have focused on school nutrition standards, it remains to be seen whether these policies translate into healthy food practices at the school level, where student behavior will be impacted. ⋯ Policy may be an effective tool to decrease junk food in schools, particularly in elementary and middle schools.