Cooking for Health: a healthy food budgeting, purchasing, and cooking skills randomized controlled trial to improve diet among American Indians with type 2 diabetes.

BACKGROUND: The prevalence of poor diet quality and type 2 diabetes are exceedingly high in many rural American Indian (AI) communities. Because of limited resources and infrastructure in some communities, implementation of interventions to promote a healthy diet is challenging-which may exacerbate health disparities by region (urban/rural) and ethnicity (AIs/other populations). It is critical to adapt existing evidence-based healthy food budgeting, purchasing, and cooking programs to be relevant to underserved populations with a high burden of diabetes and related complications. The Cooking for Health Study will work in partnership with an AI community in South Dakota to develop a culturally-adapted 12-month distance-learning-based healthy food budgeting, purchasing, and cooking intervention to improve diet among AI adults with type 2 diabetes. METHODS: The study will enroll 165 AIs with physician-diagnosed type 2 diabetes who reside on the reservation. Participants will be randomized to an intervention or control arm. The intervention arm will receive a 12-month distance-learning curriculum adapted from Cooking Matters® that focuses on healthy food budgeting, purchasing, and cooking skills. In-person assessments at baseline, month 6 and month 12 will include completion of the Nutrition Assessment Shared Resources Food Frequency Questionnaire and a survey to assess frequency of healthy and unhealthy food purchases. Primary outcomes of interest are: (1) change in self-reported intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs); and (2) change in the frequency of healthy and unhealthy food purchases. Secondary outcomes include: (1) change in self-reported food budgeting skills; (2) change in self-reported cooking skills; and (3) a mixed-methods process evaluation to assess intervention reach, fidelity, satisfaction, and dose delivered/received. DISCUSSION: Targeted and sustainable interventions are needed to promote optimal health in rural AI communities. If effective, this intervention will reduce intake of SSBs and the purchase of unhealthy foods; increase the purchase of healthy foods; and improve healthy food budgeting and cooking skills among AIs with type 2 diabetes - a population at high risk of poor health outcomes. This work will help inform future health promotion efforts in resource-limited settings. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This study was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on October 9, 2018 with Identifier NCT03699709 .

The Body Odor Disgust Scale (BODS): Development and Validation of a Novel Olfactory Disgust Assessment.

Disgust plays a crucial role in the avoidance of pathogen threats. In many species, body odors provide important information related to health and disease, and body odors are potent elicitors of disgust in humans. With this background, valid assessments of body odor disgust sensitivity are warranted. In the present article, we report the development and psychometric validation of the Body Odor Disgust Scale (BODS), a measure suited to assess individual differences in disgust reaction to a variety of body odors. Collected data from 3 studies (total n = 528) show that the scale can be used either as a unidimensional scale or as a scale that reflects two hypothesized factors: sensitivity to one's own body odors versus those of others. Guided by our results, we reduced the scale to 12 items that capture the essence of these 2 factors. The final version of the BODS shows an excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's αs > 0.9). The BODS subscales show convergent validity with other general disgust scales, as well as with other olfactory functions measures and with aspects of personality that are related to pathogen avoidance. A fourth study confirmed the construct validity of the BODS and its measurement invariance to gender. Moreover, we found that, compared with other general disgust scales, the BODS is more strongly related to perceived vulnerability to disease. The BODS is a brief and valid assessment of trait body odor disgust sensitivity.

Tradeoffs between mating effort and parenting effort in a polygynandrous mammal.

Reproductive strategies are defined by expenditures of time and energy devoted to mating effort, which increases mating opportunities, and parenting effort, which enhances the survival of offspring. We examine tradeoffs between mating effort and parenting effort in male olive baboons, Papio anubis, a species in which males compete for mating opportunities, but also form ties to lactating females (primary associations) that represent a form of parenting effort. Males that are involved in more primary associations invest less in mating effort than males who are involved in fewer primary associations. Males that are involved in more primary associations play a smaller role in establishing proximity to their primary associates than other males, suggesting that males operate under temporal constraints. There is also some evidence that involvement in primary associations negatively affects paternity success. Taken together, the data suggest that males face tradeoffs between mating effort and parenting effort.

Relationship between social support and incident hypertension in the Jackson Heart Study: a cohort study.

OBJECTIVES: Social support may be an important mitigating factor against adverse cardiovascular outcomes by facilitating health-promoting behaviours or by buffering against the negative effects of stress. This study examined the association of social support with incident hypertension. DESIGN: Prospective cohort study. SETTING: We evaluated the association of social support with incident hypertension among participants in the Jackson Heart Study, a community-based cohort of African Americans. PARTICIPANTS: This study included African American adults, who were free of hypertension at baseline (2000-2004). Functional social support, structural social support and satisfaction with social support were assessed at baseline among 1516, 1240 and 1503 participants, respectively. OUTCOME MEASURES: Incident hypertension was assessed at follow-up examinations in 2005-2008 and 2009-2013. Incident hypertension was defined by the first visit with systolic blood pressure ≥140 mm Hg, diastolic blood pressure ≥90 mm Hg or self-reported antihypertensive medication use. Multivariable Poisson regression was used to estimate the association of baseline social support with incident hypertension, adjusting for relevant confounders. RESULTS: At baseline, the mean age of participants was 50 years and 64% were men. During a median follow-up time of 6.9 years, 54% of participants developed hypertension. A high level of functional social support was associated with lower risk of incident hypertension (incident rate ratio 0.64, (95% CI 0.41 to 0.97)), compared with a low level of functional social support. Level of structural social support and satisfaction with social support were not associated with hypertension risk. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that greater functional support may be associated with a lower risk of incident hypertension.

The burden of injury in China, 1990-2017: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017.

BACKGROUND: A comprehensive evaluation of the burden of injury is an important foundation for selecting and formulating strategies of injury prevention. We present results from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017 of non-fatal and fatal outcomes of injury at the national and subnational level, and the changes in burden for key causes of injury over time in China. METHODS: Using the methods and results from GBD 2017, we describe the burden of total injury and the key causes of injury based on the rates of incidence, cause-specific mortality, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in China estimated using DisMod-MR 2.1. We additionally evaluated these results at the provincial level for the 34 subnational locations of China in 2017, measured the change of injury burden from 1990 to 2017, and compared age-standardised DALYs due to injuries at the provincial level against the expected rates based on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite measure of development of income per capita, years of education, and total fertility rate. FINDINGS: In 2017, in China, there were 77·1 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 72·5-81·6) new cases of injury severe enough to warrant health care and 733 517 deaths (681 254-767 006) due to injuries. Injuries accounted for 7·0% (95% UI 6·6-7·2) of total deaths and 10·0% (9·5-10·5) of all-cause DALYs in China. In 2017, there was a three-times variation in age-standardised injury DALY rates between provinces of China, with the lowest value in Macao and the highest in Yunnan. Between 1990 and 2017, the age-standardised incidence rate of all injuries increased by 50·6% (95% UI 46·6-54·6) in China, whereas the age-standardised mortality and DALY rates decreased by 44·3% (41·1-48·9) and 48·1% (44·6-51·8), respectively. Between 1990 and 2017, all provinces of China experienced a substantial decline in DALY rates from all injuries ranging from 16·3% (3·1-28·6) in Shanghai and 60·4% (53·7-66·1) in Jiangxi. Age-standardised DALY rates for drowning; injuries from fire, heat and hot substances; adverse effects of medical treatments; animal contact; environmental heat and cold exposure; self-harm; and executions and police conflict each declined by more than 60% between 1990 and 2017. INTERPRETATION: Between 1990 and 2017, China experienced a decrease in the age-standardised DALY and mortality rates due to injury, despite an increase in the age-standardised incidence rate. These trends occurred in all provinces. The divergent trends in terms of incidence and mortality indicate that with rapid sociodemographic improvements, the case fatality of injuries has declined, which could be attributed to an improving health-care system but also to a decreasing severity of injuries over this time period. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Body odour disgust sensitivity predicts authoritarian attitudes.

Authoritarianism has resurfaced as a research topic in political psychology, as it appears relevant to explain current political trends. Authoritarian attitudes have been consistently linked to feelings of disgust, an emotion that is thought to have evolved to protect the organism from contamination. We hypothesized that body odour disgust sensitivity (BODS) might be associated with authoritarianism, as chemo-signalling is a primitive system for regulating interpersonal contact and disease avoidance, which are key features also in authoritarianism. We used well-validated scales for measuring BODS, authoritarianism and related constructs. Across two studies, we found that BODS is positively related to authoritarianism. In a third study, we showed a positive association between BODS scores and support for Donald Trump, who, at the time of data collection, was a presidential candidate with an agenda described as resonating with authoritarian attitudes. Authoritarianism fully explained the positive association between BODS and support for Donald Trump. Our findings highlight body odour disgust as a new and promising domain in political psychology research. Authoritarianism and BODS might be part of the same disease avoidance framework, and our results contribute to the growing evidence that contemporary social attitudes might be rooted in basic sensory functions.