Purpose: Fruits and vegetables are primary sources of vitamins and minerals that may alleviate the risk of chronic illnesses. Indian adolescents consume inadequate amounts of fruits and vegetables, with less than 10% meeting recommendations. Micronutrient deficiencies are a major public health problem in India. To promote fruit and vegetable consumption among adolescents, we need to identify the factors which may influence the consumption of fruit and vegetables among Indian adolescents. The aim of this qualitative inquiry was to explore perceived influences of fruit and vegetable consumption among Indian adolescents.

Methods: Using purposive sampling, adolescents aged 10-19 years were recruited from two public and two private schools in Varanasi, India. Face-to-face interviews along with the ‘draw and tell’ technique were used to examine barriers and facilitators to fruit and vegetable consumption. Interviews were conducted in Hindi/English, per the preference of the participants. The conversations were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim, and translated to English (where necessary) for analysis. The transcribed data were subjected to thematic analysis informed by Template Analysis technique. Themes were extracted using NVivo software program. This study received ethical approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee of Banaras Hindu University (Dean/2022/EC/2817).

Results: A total of 58 adolescents (53% female; 74% urban) with mean age 13.6 years completed the interviews. Ten themes emerged, including: (i) Sensory properties of fruits and vegetables (i.e., taste, color, flavor, texture); (ii) Fruit and vegetable allergies; (iii) Fruits and vegetables are good for health and immunity; (iv) Peer influence; (v) Parental influence (e.g. parents provide nutrition education); (vi) Cost of fruits and vegetables; (vii) Food preparation (e.g. fruits preferred in shakes and juices); (viii) School food environment (e.g. non-availability of fruits in private schools); (ix) Home food environment (e.g. vegetables grown in kitchen gardens); (x) Liking for energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods.

Conclusions: The results show that multiple factors are likely to affect fruit and vegetable consumption in adolescents, aligning with literature on adolescent fruit and vegetable consumption in international settings. Behavioral interventions should be designed to create enabling environments to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption in adolescents by removing barriers at the individual, household, and community levels.

Purpose:Several sit-stand desk-based interventions have proved to be effective in reducing sedentary behavior (SB), and in addition improving other health behaviors. Recognizing the intricate interplay between health behaviors, we aimed to test if the Stand Up for Healthy Aging (SUFHA) intervention – a 6-month cluster randomized controlled trial designed to reduce and break up SB – induced a concurrent positive shift in eating-related habits/behaviors of office-based workers.

Methods:Thirty-eight office-based workers (76.3% women; 43.8±8.0years; mean BMI 28.8±6.9kg/m2; 71.6% highly educated) were randomized into an intervention vs. control group. Both groups attended an initial educational session on the independent benefits of reducing and interrupting sitting time with standing and other activities. The intervention group was provided with sit-stand desks plus motivational nudges (e.g., animated short videos containing simple tips on different forms of breaking SB) during 6 months; the control group was a waiting-list. Eating-related habits/behaviors were assessed with the MedDietScore plus other specific indicators. Differences between groups were examined using independent sample t-tests/Mann-Whitney U-test. To evaluate the effects of the intervention on eating-related outcomes, adjusted for clustering, sex, age, and BMI, repeated measures ANCOVA were conducted, where time (baseline and 6-month follow-up) was the within-subjects factor and intervention group was the between-subjects factor.

Results:No differences were found between the intervention and control groups regarding study variables at baseline (p>0.05). Differences between groups were found at intervention-end for vegetables (raw or cooked) and fish (and fisheries) consumption, favoring the intervention group (~7-12 portions/week vs. 1-6 portions/week in the control group, p=0.019; and ~3-4 portions/week vs. 1-2 portions/week in the control group, p=0.020; respectively), and also for adherence to the Mediterranean diet, also favoring the intervention group (31.84±4.6 vs. 28.47±3.2, p=0.032). A time*group interaction was observed for vegetables consumption, i.e., there were changes in vegetables consumption over time for both the intervention and control groups, in different directions: slightly increased from baseline to 6 months in the intervention group and decreased in the control group.

Conclusions:An intervention designed to reduce SB also promoted eating-related changes, highlighting the potential of these type of interventions to serve as a catalyst for broader health-related behavioral changes.

Purpose: Conservatives are more trusting in science that promotes economic growth (“production science”) than liberals but are less trusting of science that explores the health and environmental impacts of development (“impact science”). Similarly, climate communication literature demonstrates that environmentally-framed information is less widely accepted compared to public health-framed information. We hypothesized that conservatives would be more trusting in production and human-focused impact science than environmentally focused-impact science when evaluating food-related scientific fields.

Methods: We sampled 400 people living in the U.S. through Prolific. Participants answered 5-point Likert scale questions (1 = completely distrust, 5 = completely trust) about their trust towards the specific fields (nutrition, food, agriculture, and environment). For each scientific field, trust was assessed for each type of science: (1) production, (2) impact on human health, (3) impact on environment, and (4) production that considers concerns of impact (“in-between”). Lastly, participants answered questions about their political beliefs. Preliminary statistical analyses include descriptive statistics (mean + SD) and Cronbach alpha to assess the internal consistency of the trust scales.

Results/findings: Overall, production science (3.60 ± 0.87) was less trusted than impact on human (4.07 ± 0.77), impact on environment (3.98 ± 0.96), and in-between (4.05 ± 0.82) sciences. The most conservative individuals placed the lowest trust in impact on environment science (2.25 ± 0.90) but still placed the highest trust in impact on human science (3.07 ± 0.86). Although conservatives place more trust in production science than impact on environment science, the most conservative (2.48 ± 1.03) are still less trusting of production science than the most liberal (4.05 ± 0.70). Our scales of trust in science have good internal consistency based on Cronbach’s alpha scores which ranged from 0.80 to 0.93.

Conclusions: These findings contradict previous research showing that conservatives trust production science more than liberals. In fact, our results show that conservatives are more trusting of impact science, when it pertains to human health, than production science. This may suggest that Americans trust science regarding the food system differently to other scientific fields. It may also suggest that trust in science is changing amongst certain groups.