Search Results (41)

Healthy food service guidelines (HFSG) comprise food, nutrition, behavioral design, and other standards to guide the purchasing, preparation, and offering of foods and beverages in worksites and institutional food service. To date, there have been few attempts to synthesize evidence for HFSG effectiveness in non-K-12 or early childhood education sectors, particularly at worksites and institutional food services. We conducted a scoping review to achieve the following: (1) characterize the existing literature on the effectiveness of HFSG for improving the institution’s food environment, financial outcomes, and consumers’ diet quality and health, and (2) identify gaps in the literature. The initial search in PubMed and Web of Science retrieved 10,358 articles; after screening and snowball searching, 68 articles were included for analysis. Studies varied in terms of HFSG implementation settings, venues, and outcomes in both U.S. (n = 34) and non-U.S. (n = 34) contexts. The majority of HFSG interventions occurred in venues where food is sold (e.g., worksite cafeterias, vending machines). A diversity of HFSG terminology and measurement tools demonstrates the literature’s breadth. Literature gaps include quasi-experimental study designs, as well as interventions in settings that serve dependent populations (e.g., universities, elderly feeding programs, and prisons). Full article

We live in an era where digitalization and omnichannel strategies significantly transform retail landscapes, and accurate spatial analytics from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can deliver substantial competitive benefits. Nonetheless, despite evident practical advantages for specific targeting strategies and operational efficiency, the degree of GIS integration into academic marketing literature remains ambiguous. Clarifying this uncertainty is beneficial for advancing theoretical understanding and ensuring retail strategies fully leverage robust, data-driven spatial intelligence. To examine the intellectual development of the field, co-occurrence analysis, topic mapping, and citation structure visualization were performed on 4952 peer-reviewed articles using the Bibliometrix R package (version 4.3.3) within R software (version 4.4.1). The results demonstrate that although GIS-based methods have been effectively incorporated into fields like site selection and spatial segmentation, traditional marketing research has not yet entirely adopted them. One of the study’s key findings is the distinction between “author keywords” and “keywords plus,” where researchers concentrate on novel topics like omnichannel retail, artificial intelligence, and logistics. However, “Keywords plus” still refers to more traditional terms such as pricing, customer satisfaction, and consumer behavior. This discrepancy presents a misalignment between current research trends and indexed classification practices. Although the mainstream retail research lacks terminology connected to geomarketing, a theme evolution analysis reveals a growing focus on technology-driven and sustainability-related concepts associated with the Retail 4.0 and 5.0 paradigms. These findings underscore a conceptual and structural deficiency in the literature and indicate the necessity for enhanced integration of GIS and spatial decision support systems (SDSS) in retail marketing. Full article

Background: Pharmacogenetics (PGx) is the science of assessing how genetic variation affects drug efficacy, tolerability, and safety. While PGx is an emerging discipline which is becoming standard of care, many providers have misunderstandings about its utility. This is even more of a problem for patients, who may perceive that there is a single drug that is “right” for them. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate consumer comprehension of a newly developed patient-facing PGx report. Methods: In this study, we adapted a commercial pharmacogenetic test (Genomind Professional PGx) into a report intended to be more comprehensible to the consumer. The initial translation of the clinical terminology used in the PGx report, into lay terminology was conducted by PharmDs and PhDs who have collectively provided over 20,000 PGx consults to date. These reports were then evaluated with readability scoring software to ensure each translation’s complexity remained ≤8th-grade reading level. A total of 107 participants were recruited to conduct the initial analysis with a goal of achieving a 90% comprehension rate using the Genomind consumer comprehension survey. These participants were also given a modified Minnesota Assessment of Pharmacogenomic Literacy (MAPL™) both before and after the Genomind comprehension survey to assess overall PGx literacy. Results: Ninety-eight (98) out of 107 research participants scored one or zero questions incorrectly, translating to >90% comprehension score on the Genomind consumer comprehension survey. These participants also demonstrated a significant increase in overall pharmacogenetic literacy, as assessed by MAPL after viewing the consumer report and survey. Conclusions: This study found that translating pharmacogenetic test results into lay language may provide individuals with a greater understanding of how their DNA may impact prescribed medications. Full article

Currently, consumers demand healthier and more sustainable foods, but it must be considered that sensory characteristics directly drive acceptability and preference. The objective of this review was to analyze the functions of mushrooms and the sensory terminology used for the sensory characterization of mushrooms and mushroom-enriched meat products. Efforts have been made to reduce animal fat, salt, synthetic additives, and meat, in which mushrooms stand out because they can replace these components. Various species have been explored, mostly with positive effects on physicochemical, nutritional, technological, and sensory characteristics. However, in the sensory aspect, the results are limited to the measurement of acceptability using a hedonic scale. Studies of the sensory properties of mushrooms relate terms beyond umami. For instance, terms such as fermented, yeasty, musty, earthy, crunchy, hard, sweet, mushroom, nutty, moist, and salty, among others, have been associated with various mushroom species. This terminology needs to be explored in mushroom-enriched meat products. However, little has been explored regarding consumer opinions for the generation of sensory terms to characterize mushrooms or mushroom-enriched meat products, which may be relevant for the purposes of reformulating healthier and more sustainable meat products. In this sense, future studies should explore diverse mushroom species, the amount and form of use, processing conditions, and functions. Therefore, better decisions can be made about which species to use, considering factors that allow for maximizing the benefits of mushrooms. This purpose can be achieved if the background of consumers who evaluate the products through their opinions is explored, which is a direct response to the industrial scaling of mushrooms as new ingredients in meat products. Full article

Many agreements and protocols in the global framework call on industries and businesses to respond to threats related to climate change. New terminologies such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores address this issue and responsibility. This study investigates the impact of sustainability (environment (ENV), social (SOC), governance (GOV), and ESG) on the financial performance of firms in the fast-moving consumer goods industry from 2013 to 2020, the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (SCKP). The study sample covers 113 firms in the North American region (the USA and Canada did not participate in SCKP). The results showed that ESG is not an influencer of financial performance, while ENV and SOC components negatively affect financial performance. On the other hand, GOV is the most significant influencer that positively impacts financial performance. Based on these findings, ESG and its components are not conducive to promoting financial performance during the SCKP period. However, fast-moving consumer goods are ahead of other sectors in terms of sustainability disclosure. Moreover, the highest positive impact of GOV is attributed to the advanced system with rules, standards, and regulations that foster the better and more efficient governance of firms from developed countries. Full article

The increasing volume of medical information available in digital format presents a significant challenge for researchers seeking to extract relevant information. Manually analyzing voluminous data is a time-consuming process that constrains researchers’ productivity. In this context, innovative and intelligent computational approaches to information search, such as large language models (LLMs), offer a promising solution. LLMs understand natural language questions and respond accurately to complex queries, even in the specialized domain of medicine. This paper presents MédicoBERT, a medical language model in Spanish developed by adapting a general domain language model (BERT) to medical terminology and vocabulary related to diseases, treatments, symptoms, and medications. The model was pre-trained with 3 M medical texts containing 1.1 B words. Furthermore, with promising results, MédicoBERT was adapted and evaluated to answer medical questions in Spanish. The question-answering (QA) task was fine-tuned using a Spanish corpus of over 34,000 medical questions and answers. A search was then conducted to identify the optimal hyperparameter configuration using heuristic methods and nonlinear regression models. The evaluation of MédicoBERT was carried out using metrics such as perplexity to measure the adaptation of the language model to the medical vocabulary in Spanish, where it obtained a value of 4.28, and the average F1 metric for the task of answering medical questions, where it obtained a value of 62.35%. The objective of MédicoBERT is to provide support for research in the field of natural language processing (NLP) in Spanish, with a particular emphasis on applications within the medical domain. Full article

The ubiquitous nature of polymers has led to a widespread demand for sustainable polymers in numerous industrial applications. However, a lack of well laid out guidelines, product development pathways and certifications has resulted in a lot of commotions and confusions within the polymer value chain. Herein, a meticulous review is conducted on the topic of polymer sustainability shedding light on the standards, product declarations, biobased-biomass concepts, product carbon footprint, etc. It is critical that companies significantly contribute to such sustainability efforts in lieu of market readiness and competitive advantages. Any discussion within the sustainability horizon references a couple of terms/abbreviations/concepts. In this article, such key terminologies and concepts related to polymer sustainability are reviewed with a holistic outlook on the widespread approaches within the polymer sustainability horizon. In the polymer raw material manufacturers, the mass balance approach has gained more momentum with International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC). Product carbon footprint, life cycle analysis and third-party certifications were noted as the three key factors of sustainability engagement, with polymer manufactures placing sustainability commitments and targets for carbon emissions control. It is foreseen that a collaborative network between academic research, raw material manufacturers and the upstream companies and consumers will drive the sustainable polymer products market. Full article

Consumers often cite cognitive improvements as reasons for making dietary changes or using dietary supplements, a motivation that if leveraged could greatly enhance public health. However, rarely is it considered whether standardized cognitive tests that are used in nutrition research are aligned to outcomes of interest to the consumer. This knowledge gap presents a challenge to the scientific substantiation of nutrition-based cognitive health benefits. Here we combined focus group transcript review using reflexive thematic analysis and a multidisciplinary expert panel exercise to evaluate the applicability of cognitive performance tools/tasks for substantiating the specific cognitive benefits articulated by consumers with the objectives to (1) understand how consumers comprehend the potential benefits of nutrition for brain health, and (2) determine the alignment between consumers desired brain benefits and validated tests and tools. We derived a ‘Consumer Taxonomy of Cognitive and Affective Health in Nutrition Research’ which describes the cognitive and affective structure from the consumers perspective. Experts agreed that validated tests exist for some consumer benefits including focused attention, sustained attention, episodic memory, energy levels, and anxiety. Prospective memory, flow, and presence represented novel benefits that require the development and validation of new tests and tools. Closing the gap between science and consumers and fostering co-creative approaches to nutrition research are critical to the development of products and dietary recommendations that support realizable cognitive benefits that benefit public health. Full article

The importance of meat alternatives is expected to grow significantly in the future. Resulting from their increasing popularity, a political debate has been ongoing in the European Union, among other jurisdictions, concerning regulatory requirements of the labelling of meat alternatives. A restriction of meat terminology on the labels of meat alternatives was proposed, as these labels are allegedly misleading. However, limited research exists that provides insight into consumer perspectives on this presumed confusing or even misleading potential of meat alternatives. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate whether meat-like terminology used on meat alternative labels have a confusing or misleading effect on Dutch consumers. The participants were presented with a reaction time test, where they were asked to categorise food products (based on their labels) as either animal-based or plant-based. There was a total of four categories: (1) vegetables, (2) meat, (3) meat alternatives with meat terminology, and (4) meat alternatives not referring to meat. The participants categorised the presented stimuli as fast as possible. The participants were excluded from the study if they did not speak the Dutch language fluently or if they followed a vegan diet. Additionally, in a short questionnaire, the participants were asked for their demographic information and about their perception towards meat alternative labelling. The preliminary results show that the participants had an increased response latency when classifying plant-based products with meat terminology as plant-based products compared to when non-meat names were used for plant-based meat substitutes. Also, the participants did make significantly more errors when categorising plant-based meat alternatives with names referring to meat products. In conclusion, the increased time needed and an increased number in mistakes when classifying meat alternatives with meat terminology could support the argument that the terminology is confusing when only the name is shown to consumers. Nevertheless, other factors such as packaging design, labels and place in the supermarket can significantly reduce this confusing aspect. These results can inform legislators and policymakers in deciding on labelling requirements for plant-based meat alternatives. Full article

Public health interest in reducing the intake of sugar-sweetened soft drinks has resulted in various guidelines and initiatives related to their consumption, together with an increase in availability and sales of low and no-sugars versions. The aim of this review was to gain insight regarding individual-level amounts and types of soft drinks consumed across the lifecycle as reported in nationally representative surveys in Europe. The review highlighted significant gaps and challenges regarding the availability of recent country-specific soft drink consumption data including heterogeneity in categorisations used in reporting soft drinks. Nonetheless, crude estimates of mean intake (across countries) indicated that total soft drinks and soft drinks with sugars was highest in adolescents and lowest in infants/toddlers and older adults. For infants/toddlers, crude mean intakes of soft drinks with reduced/no sugars were higher than soft drinks with sugars. The review also found that consumption of total soft drinks is decreasing with a shift to consumption of soft drinks with reduced/no sugars in replacement of sugars-containing soft drinks. This review provides valuable insight into what data are currently available on soft drink consumption in Europe with heterogeneity in categorisations, terminology, and definitions of soft drinks observed. Full article

The nonlinear characteristics of power electronic-based loads in a power system contribute a major role in the harmonics’ injection and other power quality disturbances. This affects the quality of the power supplied to consumers by distribution systems. Flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) devices at the transmission level and custom power devices at the distribution level are used for an effective power transfer. In addition to these devices, filters play a prominent role in distribution systems. This paper aims to analyze the supply voltage in the time–frequency domain to perceive the variations in signal strength, explaining the role and significance of filters in mitigating or reducing harmonics. This paper presents the significance of harmonic filters in terms of signal-processing terminology. This depicts the prominent role of filters in improving the power quality by harmonic reduction or elimination, depending upon the requirement. The mathematical transform used in this approach is the short-time Fourier transform, which results in transforming the signal into a domain giving information about time and frequency. A MATLAB Simulink environment and ‘spectrogram’ were used to simulate harmonic signals, and we analyzed them using a short-time Fourier transform. Different windows were used with varying window size lengths. Full article

To maintain and improve an amateur athlete’s fitness throughout training and to achieve peak performance in sports events, good nutrition and physical activity (general and training specifically) must be considered as important factors. In our context, the terminology “amateur athletes” represents those who want to practice sports to protect their health from sickness and diseases and improve their ability to join amateur athlete events (e.g., marathons). Unlike professional athletes with personal trainer support, amateur athletes mostly rely on their experience and feeling. Hence, amateur athletes need another way to be supported in monitoring and recommending more efficient execution of their activities. One of the solutions to (self-)coaching amateur athletes is collecting lifelog data (i.e., daily data captured from different sources around a person) to understand how daily nutrition and physical activities can impact their exercise outcomes. Unfortunately, not all factors of the lifelog data can contribute to understanding the mutual impact of nutrition, physical activities, and exercise frequency on improving endurance, stamina, and weight loss. Hence, there is no guarantee that analyzing all data collected from people can produce good insights towards having a good model to predict what the outcome will be. Besides, analyzing a rich and complicated dataset can consume vast resources (e.g., computational complexity, hardware, bandwidth), and this therefore does not suit deployment on IoT or personal devices. To meet this challenge, we propose a new method to (i) discover the optimal lifelog data that significantly reflect the relation between nutrition and physical activities and training performance and (ii) construct an adaptive model that can predict the performance for both large-scale and individual groups. Our suggested method produces positive results with low MAE and MSE metrics when tested on large-scale and individual datasets and also discovers exciting patterns and correlations among data factors. Full article

Video-capsule endoscopy (VCE) reading is a time- and energy-consuming task. Agreement on findings between readers (either different or the same) is a crucial point for increasing performance and providing valid reports. The aim of this systematic review with meta-analysis is to provide an evaluation of inter/intra-observer agreement in VCE reading. A systematic literature search in PubMed, Embase and Web of Science was performed throughout September 2022. The degree of observer agreement, expressed with different test statistics, was extracted. As different statistics are not directly comparable, our analyses were stratified by type of test statistics, dividing them in groups of “None/Poor/Minimal”, “Moderate/Weak/Fair”, “Good/Excellent/Strong” and “Perfect/Almost perfect” to report the proportions of each. In total, 60 studies were included in the analysis, with a total of 579 comparisons. The quality of included studies, assessed with the MINORS score, was sufficient in 52/60 studies. The most common test statistics were the Kappa statistics for categorical outcomes (424 comparisons) and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) for continuous outcomes (73 comparisons). In the overall comparison of inter-observer agreement, only 23% were evaluated as “good” or “perfect”; for intra-observer agreement, this was the case in 36%. Sources of heterogeneity (high, I² 81.8–98.1%) were investigated with meta-regressions, showing a possible role of country, capsule type and year of publication in Kappa inter-observer agreement. VCE reading suffers from substantial heterogeneity and sub-optimal agreement in both inter- and intra-observer evaluation. Artificial-intelligence-based tools and the adoption of a unified terminology may progressively enhance levels of agreement in VCE reading. Full article

To explore how to effectively identify and select prosumers to promote the innovation capabilities of manufacturers, this paper focused on the potential value of the rise in prosumers. By means of documentary, this paper sorts out the development origin and conceptual characteristics of prosumers and further specifies the concept of prosumers from the general explanation. It includes the characteristics of prosumers derived from consumers and features of the prosumers’ participation in production, creative potential, collaboration and interaction, use of resources/tools, and new value production. Through a terminology comparison and evaluation, three classified dimensions based on the characteristics of prosumers were refined: degree of participation, range of interaction, and capacity of prosumption. The case induction method was further adopted to subdivide the levels of prosumers in different feature dimensions. Finally, a classification model based on the multidimensional characteristics of prosumers was proposed, and combined with the functional analysis method, the model can be described by metric space, and subspaces for collaboration-oriented prosumers were divided. It provides a reference basis for evaluating different types of prosumers. This paper not only promotes the development of the theory of prosumption, expanding the collaboration toward prosumers, but also helps to provide a reference and basis for manufacturers to select prosumers for collaborative co-creation. Full article

Reducing the alcoholic strength in beverages as a strategy to reduce harmful alcohol use has been proposed by multilateral institutions such as the World Health Organization and governments worldwide. Different industrial and artisanal techniques are used to achieve low-alcohol content beverages. Therefore, regulations regarding the content of alcohol in beverages and strategies to monitor compliance are important, because they are the main reason for classification of the beverages and are central to their categorization and market labelling. Furthermore, analytical techniques with adequate sensitivity as low as 0.04% vol are necessary to determine the alcohol ranges necessary for classification. In this narrative review, the definitions of no and low (NoLo) alcohol products are described and the differences in the legal definitions of these products in several regions of the world are highlighted. Currently, there is clearly confusion regarding the terminology of “no”, “free”, “zero”, “low”, “light”, or “reduced” alcohol products. There is an urgent need for global harmonization (e.g., at the Codex Alimentarius level) of the definitions from a commercial perspective and also to have common nomenclature for science and for consumer information. Full article