Whereas public information campaigns have failed to reverse the rising trend in obesity, economists support food taxes as they suggest they can force individuals to change their eating behavior and make the agro-food industry think more about healthy food products. Excise taxes based on the unhealthy nutrient content would be more effective since they impact more on unhealthy food products than...

BACKGROUND Combinations of foods that provide suitable levels of nutrients and energy are required for optimum health. Currently, however, it is difficult to define numerically what are 'suitable levels'. OBJECTIVE To develop new metrics based on energy considerations-the Nutrient Balance Concept (NBC)-for assessing overall nutrition quality when combining foods and meals. METHOD The NBC wa...

The low fertilizer utilization at growing season and environment pollution coursed by unreasonable fertilization are becoming global outstanding problems in agricultural production. Scientific and reasonable fertilization based on rapid and nondestructive plant nutrient detection will be a valuable solution for solving above problems. In this study, spectral transmittance in wavelength ranged f...

In this study, we selected four different color fleshed sweet potatoes, purple(Jizi 01), red(Xinong 431), yellow(Beijing 553) and white(Shangshu 19) fleshed cultivars as test materials, analyzed nutrient composition, dietary fiber content, anthocyanins quantification, and total phenolics content, and also measured their total antioxidant activity in four different types of sweet potato. In view...