Amidst the ongoing societal and economic shifts in the Eastern Mediterranean region (EMR), this study aims at investigating temporal trends in food consumption and nutrient intakes among Lebanese ...adults, by age and sex. Data were derived from two national cross-sectional surveys conducted in Lebanon during two time periods (1997; 2008/2009). In both surveys, dietary assessment was based on 24-h recalls. The results, expressed as % energy intake (%EI), revealed a significant decrease (
< 0.001) in the consumption of bread, fruits, fresh fruit juices, milk and eggs, whereas the consumption of added fats and oils, poultry, cereals and cereal-based products, chips and salty crackers, sweetened milk and hot beverages increased over time (
< 0.001). A significant increase in dietary energy (kcal/day) and fat intake (%EI) was observed, coupled with decreases in carbohydrate intake (%EI) and dietary density of vitamin A and vitamin C (per 1000 kcal) (
< 0.001). These changes were noted in both genders and across age groups, albeit there were some disparities between groups. In conclusion, based on national nutrition surveys, this study is the first to characterize the nutrition transition in a middle-income country of the EMR, shedding light on priority areas for nutrition policies and interventions.
Introduction:
Diets are currently unsustainable in many countries as evidenced by the growing burden of malnutrition, degradation of natural resources, contributions to climate change, and ...unaffordability of healthy diets. Agreement on what constitutes a healthy and sustainable diet has been debated. In 2019, FAO and WHO published the Sustainable Healthy Diets Guiding Principles, defining what qualifies as a sustainable healthy diet. While valuable, these principles require measurable indicators to support their operationalization. Our scoping review aims to describe how sustainable healthy diets have been assessed in the literature since 2010.
Methods:
A search for English-language articles published in peer-reviewed journals was conducted from January 2010 through February 2020 across three databases. Out of the 504 articles initially identified, 103 articles were included. Metadata were extracted from each article on: publication year, country of study, study aims, methods, main data sources, indicators used to assess sustainable healthy diets, reported indicator strengths or limitations, and main study findings. A qualitative content analysis identified major conceptual themes across indicators and their frequency of use.
Findings:
From the 103 empirical articles included in our review, 57.3% were published after 2017. Most studies were carried out in high-income countries (74%). Approximately 42% of the articles assessed the sustainability of diets using solely health and environmental indicators; <25% assessed the sustainability of diets across health, environmental, and sociocultural aspects of sustainability. We found a substantial number of unique indicators used for assessing health (
n
= 82), environmental (
n
= 117), and sociocultural (
n
= 43) aspects of diets. These indicators covered concepts related to health outcomes, aspects of diet quality, natural resources, climate change, cultural acceptability, and cost of diets. The preponderance of indicators currently used in research likely poses challenges for stakeholders to identify the most appropriate measures.
Conclusion:
Robust indicators for sustainable healthy diets are critical for understanding trends, setting targets, and monitoring progress across national and sub-national levels. Our review highlights the geographical imbalance, the narrow focus on health and environmental aspects, and the lack of common measures used in research. Measures registries could provide the decision-support needed by stakeholders to aid in the indicator selection process.
Introduction:
Lebanon, a middle-income Eastern Mediterranean country, continues to face detrimental economic, health and socio-political challenges that are further exacerbated by the COVID-19 ...pandemic. In parallel, the country has been experiencing a remarkable nutrition transition that has contributed to the burden of malnutrition and non-communicable diseases, all imposing serious repercussions on people's livelihoods, food security, and health. Such circumstances have prodded public demand for guidance on affordable, healthy, and sustainable dietary choices to alleviate the burden to this emerging unfortunate situation.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to provide evidence-based sustainable and healthy dietary recommendations which balance the tradeoffs among the health, environmental footprint and cost dimensions of sustainability, while closely resembling the usual food consumption pattern.
Methodology:
Data from the latest available national food consumption survey was used as the usual food consumption pattern of Lebanese adults. Optimized dietary patterns were calculated using the optimization model Optimeal which produced patterns most similar to the usual diet and simultaneously satisfying the three main sets of constraints: health, environmental footprints, and cost. The identified healthy and sustainable dietary options were vetted by multiple key stakeholders from the government, academia, international, and national non-governmental organizations.
Results:
Compared to the usual intake, the optimized diet included higher intakes of whole grain bread, dark green vegetables, dairy products, and legumes, and lower intakes of refined bread, meat, poultry, added sugars, saturated fat, as compared to usual national mean consumption. The optimized dietary model resulted in a decrease in the associated environmental footprints: water use (−6%); and GHG (−22%) with no change in energy use. The cost of the optimized diet was not different from that of the usual intake.
Conclusion:
An evidence-based sustainable and healthy diet was developed for Lebanon providing the population and policy makers with some answers to a complex situation. Findings highlight the need for the development of sustainable food based dietary guidelines for Lebanon to promote diets that are healthy, sustainable, culturally acceptable, and affordable and that can alleviate food insecurity among the general population.
Can diets be healthy and sustainable? This was the question posed by Dr Hachem from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the NNEdPro Sixth International Summit on Nutrition and Health. The ...market value of the global food system is an estimated $10 trillion, while the hidden costs of global food and land use systems sum up to an astounding $12 trillion, according to the Food and Land Use Coalition 2019 report and highlighted by Lina Mahy, from the World Health Organization (WHO). Of those hidden costs, more than half is attributed to unhealthy diets and harmful farming practices. Food systems must enhance food security and nutrition for all, be inclusive, and have a positive impact on the health of people and planet, as well as be economically viable, in line with Nutrition Decade Action Area 1, Sustainable, resilient food systems for healthy diets. There are 16 guiding principles to achieve healthy diets sustainably produced, with eight related to nutrition, including promotion of exclusive breastfeeding, variety and balance across food groups, consumption of whole grains, legumes, nuts and fruits and vegetables and moderate to small amounts of animal source foods. Governments can signal commitment to a more sustainable and healthy future through the development and dissemination of food-based dietary guidelines that embed health and sustainability objectives.Professor Ray of the NNEdPro Global Centre, spoke on the role of global knowledge networks in response to global nutrition challenges, using the example of the Mobile Teaching Kitchens (MTK) model. The MTK project uses a scalable, micro-level innovation model for health and social innovation in partnership with marginalised populations. The model aims to improve the nutrition knowledge and capacity of the population through demonstration by Teaching Kitchen champions, who are trained nutrition educators. Qualified dietitians and nutritionists share knowledge and skills with community-based volunteers, to support the development of Teaching Kitchen champions in a ‘See One, Do One, Teach One’ model. Promotion of nutritious, affordable, culturally appropriate, and environmentally sustainable food is central to the MTK model. Investing in some of the most marginalised in society can have an upward social and health impact including localised supply chains and microenterprise and aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025).Professor Kumar, of the Zero Budget Natural Farming Programme of Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, continued the discussion on diet sustainability, focusing on the role of climate resilient, community managed natural farming related to nutrition and food security. To set the scene, it was discussed that the food system is facing multiple crises which pose serious threats to food security, nutrition, and the livelihood of farmers. The environmental crisis places additional strain on the food system, including soil degradation and continuous loss of soil organic matter, water stress, global warming, water and air pollution, and decreased biodiversity, thus increasing the number of people at risk of food insecurity and poor nutrition, and worsening farmer distress. While some agricultural practices are historical, namely, deforestation, forest fires, ploughing and keeping lands fallow, recent use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (biocides) have accelerated environmental decline. Regenerative agriculture, such as zero budget natural farming, was posed an alternative. It is defined as a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle, and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density. Professor Kumar reiterated the value of local knowledge networks, namely, organised women in natural farming and champion farmers, as a strength in scaling up nutrition interventions such as this. Collective action and peer learning can support behaviour change and address inequities. Collective efforts are key to sustained impact and in the words of Professor Kumar, ‘If you want to change a farmer, you have to change an entire village’.
This is the protocol for a evidence and gap map. The main objective of this evidence and gap map is to provide access to a systematic overview of available indicators for diet‐related consumer ...behaviours relevant to LMICs, to support policy makers and researchers to develop, monitor and revise food policies and programmes to leverage food systems transformations for healthier and more sustainable diets.
Capturing the mobility behavior of moving entities from their traces is a prominent theme in mobility data science. Stop@ supports behavior analysis by providing a generic framework for the mining of ...stop-move patterns in spatial trajectories across animal and human mobility scenarios. The framework is built around a stop detection method, successfully used in diverse applications in animal ecology. The method has been recently validated against accurate ground truth stops collected in a museum, proving to be effective and robust, also for the study of human mobility. Stop@ provides a rich set of functionalities to facilitate the stop-move analysis, including the parallel processing of large datasets of trajectories collected outdoor and indoor.
Territorial and Sustainable Healthy Diets Hachem, Fatima; Vanham, Davy; Moreno, Luis A.
Food and nutrition bulletin,
12/2020, Volume:
41, Issue:
2_suppl
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The rapid changes that societies have gone through in the last few decades have led to the increase in the prevalence of malnutrition in all its forms and to the degradation of natural resources and ...the environment. The change in the dietary habits and production systems are responsible for much of this change. Some territorial diets have been shown as potentially capable of reversing these trends by positively contributing to the health of people and the environment such as the Mediterranean Diet and the New Nordic Diet. In this paper, we review the contribution of these 2 diets to health and nutrition and to environmental, sociocultural, and economic sustainability proposing pertinent indicators. Learning from a culturally established diet and a constructed one, tradeoff could be reached to ensure better health and sustainability outcomes. Strong factors for achieving this goal lie in building on the sociocultural appropriation of diets, having the proper tools and indicators, investing in cross-sector collaboration and policy coherence, and having the necessary political support to push the agenda of sustainability forward.
Segmentation techniques partition a sequence of data points into a series of disjoint subsequences—segments—based on some criteria. Depending on the context and the nature of data themselves, ...segments return an approximate representation. The final result is a summarized representation of the sequence. This intuitive mechanism has been extensively studied, for example, for the summarization of time series in order to preserve the ‘shape’ of the sequence while omitting irrelevant details. This survey focuses on the use of segmentation methods for extracting behavioral information from individual mobility data, in particular from spatial trajectories. Such information can then be given a compact representation in the form of summarized trajectories, e.g., semantic trajectories and symbolic trajectories. Two major streams of research are discussed, spanning computational geometry and data mining respectively, that are emblematic of the multiplicity of views. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov 2017, 7:e1214. doi: 10.1002/widm.1214
This article is categorized under:
Algorithmic Development > Spatial and Temporal Data Mining
Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge > Data Concepts
Technologies > Structure Discovery and Clustering
Spatio‐temporal representation of the trajectory of a wild animal. The color gradient highlights the evolution in time of the movement.
At a time when the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet (MD) are pervasively recognised, a paradoxical observation is the decreasing adherence to this dietary pattern in its native countries. ...This study aims to investigate temporal trends in adherence to the MD among adolescents (10–19 years old) in Lebanon. Data were drawn from three national cross-sectional surveys conducted at three points in time: 1997 (n 2004), 2009 (n 3656) and 2015 (n 1204). Dietary intake was assessed using 24-h dietary recalls, and adherence to the MD was assessed using two country-specific indexes: the composite Mediterranean diet (c-MED) index and Lebanese Mediterranean diet (LMD) index. Significant decreases in c-MED and LMD scores and in the proportion of adolescents adhering to the MD were observed between 1997 and 2015, with more consistent results among females (P < 0·05). Projections for the year 2030 showed further decreases, with less than a quarter of adolescents remaining adherent to the MD. Based on linear regression analyses, belonging to the year 2009 was associated with significantly lower MD scores compared with 1997, even after adjustment for potential covariates (c-MED β = –0·16, 95 % CI –0·30, –0·01; LMD β = –0·42, 95 % CI –0·67, –0·17). Similar results were obtained when comparing survey year 2015 with 1997 (c-MED score β = –0·20, 95 % CI –0·33, –0·06; LMD score β = –0·60, 95 % CI –0·82, –0·37). Findings highlight the erosion of the MD among Lebanese adolescents and underline the need for a comprehensive food system approach that fosters the promotion of the MD as a nutritionally balanced and sustainable dietary pattern.
We present a framework for the partitioning of a spatial trajectory in a sequence of segments based on spatial density and temporal criteria. The result is a set of temporally separated clusters ...interleaved by sub-sequences of unclustered points. A major novelty is the proposal of an outlier or
noise
model based on the distinction between intra-cluster (
local noise
) and inter-cluster noise (
transition
): the local noise models the temporary absence from a residence while the transition the definitive departure towards a next residence. We analyze in detail the properties of the model and present a comprehensive solution for the extraction of temporally ordered clusters. The effectiveness of the solution is evaluated first qualitatively and next quantitatively by contrasting the segmentation with ground truth. The ground truth consists of a set of trajectories of labeled points simulating animal movement. Moreover, we show that the approach can streamline the discovery of additional
derived
patterns, by presenting a novel technique for the analysis of periodic movement. From a methodological perspective, a valuable aspect of this research is that it combines the theoretical investigation with the application and external validation of the segmentation framework. This paves the way to an effective deployment of the solution in broad and challenging fields such as e-science.
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