In an article that forms part of the PLoS Medicine series on Big Food, guest editors David Stuckler and Marion Nestle lay out why more examination of the food industry is necessary, and offer three competing views on how public health professionals might engage with Big Food.

Food deprivation triggers a constellation of physiological and behavioral changes including increases in peripherally-produced ghrelin and centrally-produced agouti-related protein (AgRP). Upon refeeding, food intake is increased in most species, however hamsters primarily increase food hoarding. Food deprivation-induced increases in food hoarding by Siberian hamsters are mimicked by peripheral ghrelin and central AgRP injections. Because food deprivation stimulates ghrelin as well as AgRP synthesis/release, food deprivation-induced increases in hoarding may be mediated by melanocortin 3 or 4 receptor (MC3/4-R) antagonism via AgRP, the MC3/4-R inverse agonist. Therefore, we asked: Can a MC3/4-R agonist block food deprivation- or ghrelin-induced increases in foraging, food hoarding and food intake? This was accomplished by injecting melanotan II (MTII), a synthetic MC3/4-R agonist, into the 3rd ventricle in food deprived, fed or peripheral ghrelin injected hamsters and housed in a running wheel-based food delivery foraging system. Three foraging conditions were used: a) no running wheel access, non-contingent food, b) running wheel access, non-contingent food or c) a foraging requirement for food (10 revolutions/pellet). Food deprivation was a more potent stimulator of foraging and hoarding than ghrelin. Concurrent injections of MTII completely blocked food deprivation- and ghrelin-induced increases in food intake and attenuated, but did not always completely block, food deprivation- and ghrelin-induced increases in food hoarding. Collectively, these data suggest that the MC3/4-R are involved in ghrelin- and food deprivation-induced increases in food intake, but other neurochemical systems, such as previously demonstrated with neuropeptide Y, also are involved in increases in food hoarding as well as foraging.

Background: Extensive surveys of several population settlements in different parts of India-covering plains, mountains, valleys, river banks and deeper areas of forests at different altitudes-between 1968 and 2016 demonstrated that the basic vital need of hunger is being fulfilled since antiquity by plants in the wild. Methods: Based on collections, consultations with local population personnel and literature searches, this paper presents many plants that are commonly used as food and focuses on their products, which are rich in alkaloids, polysaccharides, steroids, terpenoids, flavonoids, aminoacids, fatty acids and antibiotics etc. These complex organic compounds are suitable for the production of drugs for many ailments/diseases, including the prevention of cancers. Results: There are more than 100 families including several hundred plant taxa from various plant groups like angiosperms, bryophytes, pteridophytes, gymnosperms and even fleshy fungi, which have offered essential food items to ever-growing human populations since antiquity. Phytochemicals functioning as antioxidants are exceedingly beneficial to the human body but excess consumption of these compounds, adding higher levels of antioxidants, may even be responsible for chronic diseases including aging, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, etc. These medicines can obviously be taken in small and prescribed quantities but can never be consumed as "food items."

The objectives for this study were to examine the location and density of measured food outlets in five rural towns in the Lower Mississippi Delta, determine the spatial location of Delta Healthy Sprouts (DHS) participants' homes in the food environment, and examine relationships between the spatial location of participants' homes and their diet quality. Using a food desert/food swamp framework, food outlet geographic locations were analyzed in relation to one another, the distance between DHS participants' residence and closest food outlets by class were computed, and associations among residents' diet quality, hot spot status, and census tract classification were explored. Of 266 food outlets identified, 11 (4%), 86 (32%), 50 (19%), and 119 (45%) were classified as grocery stores (GS), convenience stores (CS), full-service restaurants (FS), or fast food restaurants (FF), respectively. A third of participants lived in CS hot spots, while 22% lived in FF hot spots. DHS participants lived closer in miles to CS (0.4) and FF (0.5) as compared to GS (1.6) and FS (1.1) outlets. Participants bought most groceries at national chain grocery stores rather than their closest grocery store. The food environments of the five towns and associated neighborhoods in which DHS participants resided were not supportive of healthful eating, containing both food deserts and food swamps, often in overlapping patterns.

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Food pairing has not yet been fully pioneered, despite our everyday experience with food and the large amount of food data available on the web. The complementary food pairings discovered thus far created by the intuition of talented chefs, not by scientific knowledge or statistical learning. We introduce FlavorGraph which is a large-scale food graph by relations extracted from million food recipes and information of 1,561 flavor molecules from food databases. We analyze the chemical and statistical relations of FlavorGraph and apply our graph embedding method to better represent foods in dense vectors. Our graph embedding method is a modification of metapath2vec with an additional chemical property learning layer and quantitatively outperforms other baseline methods in food clustering. Food pairing suggestions made based on the food representations of FlavorGraph help achieve better results than previous works, and the suggestions can also be used to predict relations between compounds and foods. Our research offers a new perspective on not only food pairing techniques but also food science in general.

No abstract available

Food deserts are a major public health concern. This study aimed to assess food and beverage availability in four underserved communities eligible to receive funding from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI). Data analyzed are part of a quasi-experimental study evaluating the impact of the HFFI on the retail food environment in selected Illinois communities. In 2015, 127 small grocery and limited service stores located in the four selected communities were audited. All communities had a large percentage of low-income and African-American residents. Differences in food and beverage item availability (e.g., produce, milk, bread, snack foods) were examined by store type and community location. Food stores had, on average, 1.8 fresh fruit and 2.9 fresh vegetable options. About 12% of stores sold low-fat milk while 86% sold whole milk. Only 12% of stores offered 100% whole wheat bread compared to 84% of stores offering white bread. Almost all (97%) stores offered soda and/or fruit juice. In summary, we found limited availability of healthier food and beverage items in the communities identified for HFFI support. Follow up findings will address how the introduction of new HFFI-supported supermarkets will affect food and beverage availability in these communities over time.

In the United States, there is an opportunity to improve the nutritional health of university students through the campus food environment. This project used a content analysis approach to investigate whether healthy food standards and policies were incorporated into the contract agreements between North Carolina (NC) public universities and their food service management companies. Food service contracts were collected from 14 NC public universities using food service management companies on campus. Each contract was evaluated using the 35-item North Carolina Food Service Policy Guidelines Assessment to examine four elements of the campus food environment: Beverages, Packaged Snacks, Prepared Foods, and Other (e.g., strategic placement of healthier food). Five university food service contracts incorporated no North Carolina Food Service Policy Guidelines, three university contracts included one to five guidelines, and six university contracts included six to nine guidelines. Altogether, 13 of the 35 guidelines were incorporated into at least one university food service contract. This project presents a cost and time-effective assessment method for determining if evidence-based nutrition guidelines have been included in university food service contracts. This approach and findings may lead to contract revisions to improve the campus food environment and, subsequently, the nutritional health of college populations.

Food literacy interventions are widely implemented to improve the food security and health of low-socioeconomic adults. The purpose of this study was to conduct an inquiry into the value of OzHarvest's six-week NEST (Nutrition Education and Skills Training) program in promoting food security and food literacy, and to identify the barriers and enablers that participants experienced in sustaining food security, and in utilising their food literacy skills beyond the program. A descriptive evaluation study with pre-post surveys (n = 21) and post-program interviews (n = 17) was conducted, with a convenience sample of NEST program participants living in Sydney, Newcastle, and Melbourne, Australia. Participants demonstrated improvements in food security status (p = 0.030), cooking confidence (p = 0.001), food preparation behaviours (p = 0.006), nutrition knowledge (p = 0.033), vegetable consumption (p = 0.043), and a reduction in intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (p = 0.017), and salty snack foods (p = 0.011). The interviews revealed that participants learned to stretch their food budgets and make meaningful changes to their food utilisation (a key dimension of food security). Interviews also identified enablers (e.g., social support) and barriers (e.g., health conditions) to achieving food security. Acknowledging the need for a multi-faceted approach that also addresses upstream determinants, interventions like NEST may play a role in promoting food security and food literacy.

Insulin receptors are expressed throughout the adult brain, and insulin from the periphery reaches the central nervous system. In humans and rodents, actions of insulin in the brain decrease food intake. Furthermore, insulin receptor activation alters dopamine and glutamate transmission within mesolimbic regions that influence food-seeking and feeding including the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Here we determined how intra-NAc insulin affects conditioned approach (a measure of cue-triggered food-seeking), free food intake, and the motivation to obtain food in hungry rats using Pavlovian and instrumental approaches. Intra-NAc insulin did not affect conditioned approach but did reduce home cage chow intake immediately following conditioned approach testing. Consistent with reduced chow intake, intra-NAc insulin also reduced the motivation to work for flavored food pellets (assessed by a progressive ratio procedure). This effect was partially reversed by insulin receptor blockade and was not driven by insulin-induced sickness or malaise. Taken together, these data show that insulin within the NAc does not alter behavioral responses to a food cue, but instead reduces the motivation to work for and consume food in hungry animals. These data are discussed in light of insulin's role in the regulation of feeding, and its dysregulation by obesity.

Food neophobia (FN) is associated with reduced quality of diet in adults; thus, the understanding of the relationship between FN and food consumption in more depth appears to be a key issue. The aim of the study was to assess the relationship between food neophobia, dietary patterns, food choice motives, and food label reading in the group of adults. Data were collected using the computer-assisted personal interviewing technique (CAPI). A cross-sectional quantitative survey was carried out in November-December 2017 in a sample of 1017 Polish adults. The questionnaire used in the study included the Food Neophobia Scale (FNS), the Beliefs and Eating Habits Questionnaire (KomPAN), and questions regarding food choice motives, reading food labels, and sociodemographic characteristics. The food neophobics were older, had a lower level of education, and had higher BMI compared to others. Compared to others, among the food neophobics, there were more people who often consumed vegetables, fruit, meat, and meat products and who rarely consumed functional and convenience food, sweets, and sweetened beverages. When choosing food, more food neophobics chose healthy and tasteless food products, while more food neophilics chose unhealthy and tasty products. More food neophobics declared not reading price and shelf-life information on food labels compared to the other two groups. Although food neophobia may make adaptation to dietary recommendations difficult, health-promoting features of the diet were observed within the food neophobics. Actions focusing on food choice motives may help even more to limit the effects of food neophobia in adults. Further research is recommended to confirm the observed relationships under different sociocultural conditions.

Modulation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity using non-invasive brain stimulation has been shown to reduce food craving as well as food consumption. Using a preregistered design, we examined whether bilateral transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the DLPFC could reduce food craving and consumption in healthy participants when administered alongside the cognitive target of inhibitory control training. Participants (N = 172) received either active or sham tDCS (2 mA; anode F4, cathode F3) while completing a food-related Go/No-Go task. State food craving, ad-lib food consumption and response inhibition were evaluated. Compared with sham stimulation, we found no evidence for an effect of active tDCS on any of these outcome measures in a predominantly female sample. Our findings raise doubts about the effectiveness of single-session tDCS on food craving and consumption. Consideration of individual differences, improvements in tDCS protocols and multi-session testing are discussed.

Food grinding is supposed to be influenced by multiple factors. However, how those factors affecting this behavior remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the effect of food restriction on food grinding in Brandt's voles (Lasiopodomys brandtii), as well as the potential role of the gut microbiota in this process, through a comparison of the variations between voles with different food supplies. Food restriction reduced the relative amount of ground food to a greater extent than it lowered the relative food consumption, and altered the abundance of Staphylococcus, Aerococcus, Jeotgalicoccus, and Un--s-Clostridiaceae bacterium GM1. Fecal acetate content for the 7.5 g-food supply group was lower than that for the 15 g-food supply group. Our study indicated that food restriction could effectively inhibit food grinding. Further, Un--s-Clostridiaceae bacterium GM1 abundance, Aerococcus abundance, and acetate content were strongly related to food grinding. Variations in gut microbial abundance and short-chain fatty acid content induced by food restriction likely promote the inhibition of food grinding. These results could potentially provide guidance for reducing food waste during laboratory rodent maintenance.

Nutritional health of children and youth is an increasing cause for concern in Canada. Through food and beverage messaging in multiple environments, young people develop eating behaviours with ramifications throughout their life course. Unhealthy food retailers near schools, recreation facilities, and childcare centres-key activity settings for healthy eating promotion-present repeated, compounding exposures to commercial geomarketing. Geomarketing impacts nutritional health by promoting highly processed, calorie-dense, and nutrient-poor foods and beverages across urban landscapes. While food retail mix (as a ratio of healthy to unhealthy food retailers) can be used to assess food environments at multiple scales, such measures may misrepresent young people's unique experience of these geographic phenomena. Moving beyond uniform conceptualization of food environments, new research methods and tools are needed for children and youth. We investigated young people's food environments in the major Canadian cities of Calgary and Edmonton. Using government-initiated nutrition guidelines, we categorized 55.8% of all food retailers in Calgary, and 59.9% in Edmonton as 'unhealthy'. A Bernoulli trial at the 0.05 alpha level indicated few differences in prevalence proximal to activity settings versus elsewhere in both cities, demonstrating the limited applicability of food retail mix for characterizing young people's food environments. To model unhealthy food retailers geomarketing to children and youth, we considered their proximity to multiple activity settings, using overlapping radial buffers at the 250 m, 500 m, 1000 m, and 1500 m scales. Examining young people's food environments relative to the spaces where they learn and play, we determined that as many as 895 out of 2663 unhealthy food retailers fell within 1500 m of 21+ activity settings. By conceptualizing, measuring, and problematizing these "super-proximal" unhealthy food retailers, urban planners and public health researchers can use these techniques to pinpoint unhealthy food retailers, or "weeds in the food swamp," as a critical site for healthy eating promotion in municipalities.

In the Southern United States (U.S.), food insecurity rates are higher in rural (20.8%) versus urban communities (15%). Food insecurity can exacerbate diet-related disease. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine differences in the use of food-related community resources and potential solutions proposed among food insecure versus food secure residents. A community survey (n = 370) was conducted in rural eastern North Carolina, with questions pertaining to food security status and food-related resources. The IBM SPSS Statistics software and SAS software were used to examine differences in food-related resources, and qualitative data analysis was used to examine differences in solutions offered between food insecure and food secure participants. Of the 370 respondents, forty-eight-point-six percent were classified as food insecure. Food insecure participants were more likely to report shopping for groceries at a convenience/discount store, less likely to use their own vehicle for transportation, and less likely to purchase food from local producers. Food insecure participants were more likely to suggest solutions related to reducing the cost of healthy food, while food secure participants were more likely to suggest educational or convenience-related interventions.

This study evaluated differences in overall diet quality, diet quality components, and food-related contextual factors between adolescents with food security and those with food insecurity. Mixed methods analysis was conducted on data from three 24-h dietary recalls from 61 adolescents ages 14-19 years old living in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 2020-2021. All adolescents were sampled from households eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2020. There were no significant differences in overall diet quality or components between adolescents with food security and those with food insecurity in this sample, except for seafood and plant proteins, which was higher for adolescents with food insecurity. Qualitative analysis found that adolescents were largely influenced by their parents and the home food environment, and that workplace environments enabled adolescents to eat foods high in refined grains, sugar, and saturated fat. These findings provide insight about the experiences of low-income adolescents during times when they are home for prolonged periods (i.e., emergency school closures, summer, and winter breaks). Programs and policies that aim to improve healthy food access may positively impact adolescent food security and diet quality, and it is important to ensure that healthy foods are available and accessible to adolescents in the places where they spend the most time. Multilevel interventions in the home, school, and workplace may be most effective in encouraging healthy eating behaviors among adolescents.

Addressing the increasing global health issue of childhood obesity, exacerbated by pervasive food marketing, this study critically evaluated China's food marketing policies in comparison with international best practices, aiming to uncover policy content and implementation gaps and inform policy enhancement strategies.

This study explores interconnections between food consumption and production of animal (by-)products in different food system scenarios within the scope of Dutch Food-Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDG). For this scenario study, a Microsoft Excel model was created that include seven scenarios with different quantities of eggs, milk, cheese, beef cattle, broilers, and pigs as input. Number of animals, intake of energy, animal protein, saturated fatty acids (SFAs), trans-fatty acids (TFAs), salt, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs), and land use (LU) were calculated and compared with current consumption and reference values. Based on the concept of eating the whole animal, every recommended lean, unprocessed portion of beef comes along with a non-recommended portion of beef (two portions for pork, 0.5 portion for broilers). The reference values for SFAs, TFAs, and salt were not exceeded if the intake of meat is limited to 410 g/week. The scenarios with recommended 450 mL semi-skimmed milk and 40 g/day low-fat cheese results in 36 g/day of butter as by-product, exceeding its acceptable intake three times. The near-vegetarian scenario with recommended amounts of eggs, milk, and cheese, includes only a portion of beef/calf per 6 days and a portion of chicken per 9 weeks as by-products. This scenario more than halves the GHGE and LU. Finally, the scenario that included the maximum recommended amounts of animal products is reachable with half the current size of Dutch livestock. This conceptual framework may be useful in the discussion on how future sustainable FBDG can incorporate a more food system-based approach.

The concept of food addiction attracts much interest in the scientific community. Research is mainly based on the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS), a tool developed to assess food addiction. Substance use disorder criteria have been used to develop this scale.