Sportsmen's Attitude towards Dietary Supplements and Nutrition Knowledge: An Investigation in Selected Roman Area Gyms.

The non-professional sport environment is a grey zone not as widely assessed as that of elite athletes. The purpose of this research was to investigate the dietary supplementation habits and the nutrition knowledge on sport (NKS) in a sample of gym users. The level of adequacy of NKS was set at ≥60% of correct answers. Almost half (46.4%) of respondents stated they used food supplements, in particular multivitamins (31.0%), amino acid pills (29.5%), minerals (29.1%), and protein powders (28.7%). Supplements were used to increase muscle mass (36.9%) and to repair muscle (35.1%). Gym trainers were the preferred source of information on the use of supplements, especially in males (84%). The NKS correct response rate was 57.1% and the proportion of respondents with a sufficient level of NKS was 47.3%. The prevalence of correct answers was highest in males (61.5%) and for respondents with the highest educational attainment levels (44.5% and 53%). This study demonstrated that non-professional sportsmen do not have sufficient knowledge of nutrition and that the gym environment does not facilitate the circulation of the correct information on the role of supplementation. Considering the importance of nutrition for sportsmen, it is necessary to put in place actions aimed at increasing the knowledge of nutrition of gym users and their trainers.

The carbon footprint of Italian schools meals: An optimal choice of dishes in vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous menus.

This study aims to assess the carbon footprint associated with vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous menus for primary school lunches in Italy. For this purpose, healthy and acceptable menus with minimal greenhouse gas emissions have been designed by a binary linear programming model. The results show that the adoption of a specific diet may help in reducing the carbon footprint of menus, but it is the optimal selection of dishes that ultimately makes the difference. Interestingly enough, the optimal choice of dishes and the restriction of meat consumption in omnivorous menus can lead up to a 40% emission reduction compared to the current school lunch menu of the municipality of Rome. Moreover, the optimal choice of dishes in vegan menus provides the menu with the lowest carbon footprint among all kinds of diets.

The Promotions of Sustainable Lunch Meals in School Feeding Programs: The Case of Italy.

School is considered a privileged environment for health education and school feeding represents an opportunity for promoting sustainable foods to young generations. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that is possible to select, from existing school menus, recipes that combine healthy foods with low environmental impact. A national sample of Italian school menus was collected and a total number of 194 recipes were included on a database containing 70 first courses, 83 s courses, 39 side dishes, 1 portion of fruit, and 1 portion of bread. A mathematical model was conceived to combine nutritional adequacy and acceptability criteria while minimizing GHGs emissions. The result is a four-week menu characterized by large vegetable components that were used not only as side dishes but also as ingredients in the first and second courses. Legumes and pasta are often included, and white meat is selected instead of red meat. The findings presented in this paper demonstrated that it is possible to design environmental-friendly meals from existing school menus. The mathematical model developed in this work has the potentiality of being completely scalable, easily updatable, and widely utilizable in different settings either for design or monitoring purposes as well as for research data collection.

Making a Sustainable Diet Acceptable: An Emerging Programming Model With Applications to Schools and Nursing Homes Menus.

Background: Food consumption is one of the most important drivers of the relation between human well-being and Earth's ecosystems. The current production level is difficult to sustain without compromising environmental integrity or public health. This calls for a decisive change in food consumption patterns in order to improve nutrition quality while respecting biodiversity and ecosystems. This change will produce some effect only if it is also culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable. The design of food plans is traditionally carried out using mathematical optimization models, such as linear programming. This method has proved to be successful in providing nutritionally adequate diets while minimizing their economic and environmental impact. Nevertheless, cultural habits as well as attractiveness and variety of meals is very difficult to deal with, and no fully satisfactory way to include these issues in linear programming has been found. Objective: The aim of this paper is to move from traditional linear programming to a new programming methodology in order to cope also with acceptability in the design of meal plans. Method: Binary integer linear programming is the new modeling paradigm. In the proposed model, meal plans consist of providing the sequence and composition of daily meals over a given period of time and each meal can be composed using dishes from a given set. Therefore, instead of defining just a level of consumption of food groups or food items, the proposed model provides a realistic menu. To cope with sustainability, the energy and nutritional content of each dish is calculated together with its price and environmental impact. Furthermore, acceptability can be explicitly taken into account in a very natural way, that is bounding the daily, weekly, or total repetitions of single dishes and of dishes in the same food groups. Results: The paper reviews three successful studies with increasing complexity considering lunch plans for schools and full-board menus for nursing homes. The case studies show a great reduction of the environmental impact of the meal plans while ensuring an adequate nutritional intake, affordable prices and most importantly the plans are varied and culturally acceptable.

Could Dietary Goals and Climate Change Mitigation Be Achieved Through Optimized Diet? The Experience of Modeling the National Food Consumption Data in Italy.

Objective: The aim of this study is to define a healthy and sustainable diet model with low GHGE, fulfilling dietary requirements, and considering current Italian food consumption patterns. Design: A duly designed database was developed, linking food nutritional composition and GHGE based on 921 food items consumed in Italy according to the last national food consumption survey (INRAN-SCAI 2005-2006). Linear programming was used to develop new diet plans separately for males and females, aged 18-60 years (n = 2,098 subjects), in order to minimize GHGE. The program is based on dietary goals and acceptability constraints as well as on 13 nutrient requirement constraints aiming to reach a healthy and acceptable diet for the Italian population. Results: Diet optimization resulted in a nutritionally adequate pattern minimizing GHGE values (4.0 vs. 1.9 kg CO2e/day for males and 3.2 vs. 1.6 kg CO2e/day for females). In both sexes, the nutrient intake of the optimized diet was at the established lower bound for cholesterol and calcium and at the established upper bound for free sugar and fiber. In males, intake of zinc was at the established lower bound whereas iron was at the established upper bound. Consumption of red meat and fruit and vegetables was at the established lower and upper bound, respectively, in both males and females. Despite the decrease in meat consumption, especially red meat, in the optimized diet with respect to the observed diet, levels of iron intake in females increased by 10% (10.3 vs. 11.3 mg/day) but remained below the adequate intake established in Italian national DRIs. Conclusions: An attainable healthy dietary pattern was developed that would lead to the reduction of GHGE by 48% for males and by 50% for females with respect to current food consumption in the Italian adult population. Health-promoting dietary patterns can substantially contribute to achieve related Sustainable Development Goals.

EUPRON: nurses' practice in interprofessional pharmaceutical care in Europe. A cross-sectional survey in 17 countries.

OBJECTIVES: Safe pharmaceutical care (PC) requires an interprofessional team approach, involving physicians, nurses and pharmacists. Nurses' roles however, are not always explicit and clear, complicating interprofessional collaboration. The aim of this study is to describe nurses' practice and interprofessional collaboration in PC, from the viewpoint of nurses, physicians and pharmacists. DESIGN: A cross-sectional survey. SETTING: The study was conducted in 17 European countries, each with their own health systems. PARTICIPANTS: Pharmacists, physicians and nurses with an active role in PC were surveyed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Nurses' involvement in PC, experiences of interprofessional collaboration and communication and views on nurses' competences. RESULTS: A total of 4888 nurses, 974 physicians and 857 pharmacists from 17 European countries responded. Providing patient education and information (PEI), monitoring medicines adherence (MMA), monitoring adverse/therapeutic effects (ME) and prescribing medicines were considered integral to nursing practice by 78%, 73%, 69% and 15% of nurses, respectively. Most respondents were convinced that quality of PC would be improved by increasing nurses' involvement in ME (95%), MMA (95%), PEI (91%) and prescribing (53%). Mean scores for the reported quality of collaboration between nurses and physicians, collaboration between nurses and pharmacists and interprofessional communication were respectively <7/10, ≤4/10, <6/10 for all four aspects of PC. CONCLUSIONS: ME, MMA, PEI and prescribing are part of nurses' activities, and most healthcare professionals felt their involvement should be extended. Collaboration between nurses and physicians on PC is limited and between nurses and pharmacists even more.

Embedding mRNA stability in correlation analysis of time-series gene expression data.

Current methods for the identification of putatively co-regulated genes directly from gene expression time profiles are based on the similarity of the time profile. Such association metrics, despite their central role in gene network inference and machine learning, have largely ignored the impact of dynamics or variation in mRNA stability. Here we introduce a simple, but powerful, new similarity metric called lead-lag R(2) that successfully accounts for the properties of gene dynamics, including varying mRNA degradation and delays. Using yeast cell-cycle time-series gene expression data, we demonstrate that the predictive power of lead-lag R(2) for the identification of co-regulated genes is significantly higher than that of standard similarity measures, thus allowing the selection of a large number of entirely new putatively co-regulated genes. Furthermore, the lead-lag metric can also be used to uncover the relationship between gene expression time-series and the dynamics of formation of multiple protein complexes. Remarkably, we found a high lead-lag R(2) value among genes coding for a transient complex.

Collective behavior in gene regulation: post-transcriptional regulation and the temporal compartmentalization of cellular cycles.

Self-sustained oscillations are perhaps the most studied objects in science. The accomplishment of such a task reliably and accurately requires the presence of specific control mechanisms to face the presence of variable and largely unpredictable environmental stimuli and noise. Self-sustained oscillations of transcript abundance are, in fact, widespread and are not limited to the reproductive cycle but are also observed during circadian rhythms, metabolic cycles, developmental cycles and so on. To date, much of the literature has focused on the transcriptional machinery underlying control of the basic timing of transcript abundance. However, mRNA abundance is known to be regulated at the post-transcriptional level also and the relative contribution of the two mechanisms to gene-expression programmes is currently a major challenge in molecular biology. Here, we review recent results showing the relevance of the post-transcriptional regulation layer and present a statistical reanalysis of the yeast metabolic cycle using publicly available gene-expression and RNA-binding data. Taken together, the recent theoretical and experimental developments reviewed and the results of our reanalysis strongly indicate that regulation of mRNA stability is a widespread, phase-specific and finely tuned mechanism for the multi-layer control of gene expression needed to achieve high flexibility and adaptability to external and internal signals.

Relative pair dynamics in simple supercooled liquids: longitudinal contributions.

The pair dynamics of simulated argon samples is investigated at the melting (85 K), supercooled (55 K), and quenched (20 K) liquid states, and in the crystal (20 K) state. Tagged pairs, initially lying in a given shell, were divided into incoming and outgoing groups and followed along simulated trajectories. Over them, specific correlation functions deltaB(r(0);t), involving the pair separation vector projected along its initial value r(0) (longitudinal dynamics), have been evaluated. More or less pronounced oscillations are detected according to the temperature of the thermodynamic states (and, obviously, their solid or liquid nature); for each state, they depend on the initial pair distance r(0), too. The oscillations vanish after few picoseconds (fast dynamics) in the case of crystal, whereas in the supercooled liquid they decay towards a plateau, whose height increases with the temperature. It is shown that the power spectrum of deltaB(r(0);t) practically yields the same density of states (DOS) produced by the pair velocity correlation function. The deltaB(r(0);t) functions obtained from the argon crystal at 20 K produce DOS curves dominated by two main frequency contributions, at about 40 and 60 cm(-1) (Einstein and Debye frequency, respectively). Their shape is quite well reproduced by damped harmonic oscillator-like (DHO) functions vibrating at that frequencies. In liquid states, the deltaB(r(0);t) plateau, that forms after the fast DHO dynamics, accounts for the system diffusivity. The relaxation towards the plateau is modeled by an exponential function whose decay time is comparable with the average vibration period. Evidence that the liquid states conserve a certain memory of the vibrational modes of the crystal is obtained. In these states, the DHO functions at the Einstein and Debye frequencies plus an exponential function cannot reproduce the deltaB(r(0);t) shape. A pronounced shoulder, that forms around 0.5 ps, requires the contribution of a third DHO. In the DOS, it yields a band centered below 20 cm(-1) that produces low frequency DOS excess in comparison with the DOS of the crystal. This contribution is present in liquid and supercooled high temperature states and survives near the temperature of the glass transition whereas the diffusion practically vanishes.

Robust real time eye tracking for computer interface for disabled people.

Gaze is a natural input for a Human Computer Interface (HCI) for disabled people, who have of course an acute need for a communication system. An efficient eye tracking procedure is presented providing a non-invasive method for real time detection of a subject eyes in a sequence of frames captured by low cost equipment. The procedure can be easily adapted to any subject and is adequately insensitive to changing of the illumination. The eye identification is performed on a piece-wise constant approximation of the frames. It is based on a discrete level set formulation of the variational approach to the optimal segmentation problem. This yields a simplified version of the original data retaining all the information relevant to the application. Tracking is obtained by a fast update of the optimal segmentation between successive frames. No eye movement model is required being the procedure fast enough to obtain the current frame segmentation as one step update from the previous frame segmentation.

Negative contributions in the velocity correlation function of supercooled liquid water.

The translational dynamics of supercooled and normal liquid water is investigated via a specific correlation function DeltaB with the aim of explaining the behavior of the centers of mass velocity correlation function (VCF). DeltaB is divided into diffusive and nondiffusive parts that yield separated contributions to the VCF, namely an Enskog-type diffusive one, modeled by an exponential function, and a nondiffusive one, made up by damped oscillations of a vanishing time integral. In the translational density of states (DOS), the oscillations yield the bands at omega(1) congruent with 50 cm(-1), omega(3) congruent with 240 cm(-1) (the two well-known experimental bands of the Raman spectra) and omega(2) congruent with 160 cm(-1) (the Einstein frequency of the liquid). It is shown that the chief negative lobe of the VCF is mainly due to the DOS component at the lowest frequency omega(1). The study of the relative pair dynamics shows that this lobe is due to the transverse dynamics, while the longitudinal one determines the fast DOS component at omega(3). The presence of a negative tail is highlighted. Its contribution extends beyond the region of the fast dynamics (t<0.7 ps) up to about 1.5 ps and is due to a low-frequency oscillating mode that produces a low-frequency DOS band centered at about omega(0)=20 cm(-1).