OBJECTIVE To assess the effects of prenatal administration of valproic acid on the survivability and day of hatching of chick embryo in comparison with age-matched controls. METHODS The experimental study was conducted at the Department of Anatomy, Regional Centre of College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan, Islamabad, from February 2010 to February 2011. Fertilised chicken eggs were divid...

Consumers engage in food handling practices that can contribute to foodborne illness, and there is interest in improving those behaviors. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the “Food Safe Families” clean and separate messages on cross-contamination behaviors of consumers and to determine the impact of external safe food handling cues. Participants (n = 123) were randomly a...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Vegetarian and vegan diets are effective in preventing and treating several chronic diseases. However, their acceptability outside a clinical trial setting has not been extensively studied. The aim of this study was to determine the acceptability of a worksite vegan nutrition program and its effects on health-related quality of life and work productivity. METHODS Employees of ...

In response to the growing interest of modern society in functional food products, this study attempts to develop a bakery product with high dietary fibre content added in the form of an oat fibre powder. Oat fibre powder with particle sizes of 75 µm (OFP1) and 150 µm (OFP2) was used, substituting 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20% of the flour. The physical properties of the dough and the final bakery produ...

Under controlled conditions, growth, survivorship and several nutritional parameters (ingestion, egestion and assimilation) were measured weekly in hatchlings that either ate a conspecific egg after birth (cannibalistic) or not (non-cannibalistic) and in food-deprived individuals (control group). Subsequently, the snails were fed on Taraxacum officinale. After 4 days, cannibalistic snails were ...

The present study aimed to examine whether a multibehavioural intervention with a focus on specific energy balance-related behaviours can affect total diet quality and its four subcomponents in European preschoolers and to investigate if these intervention effects differed by socioeconomic status (SES). Parents/caregivers of 3.5 to 5.5 year-olds (n = 4968) recruited through kindergartens in six...

We evaluated the anti-tumor activities of the oral administration of fucoidan extracted from Cladosiphon okamuranus using a tumor (colon 26)-bearing mouse model. The materials used included low-molecular-weight fucoidan (LMWF: 6.5-40 kDa), intermediate-molecular-weight fucoidan (IMWF: 110-138 kDa) and high-molecular-weight fucoidan (HMWF: 300-330 kDa). The IMWF group showed significantly suppre...

Wound healing activity of methanolic extract of leaves of Alternanthera brasiliana Kuntz was studied by excision and incision wound model (in vivo) in Sprague Dawley rats and by Chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) model (In vitro) in 9-day-old embryonated chicken eggs. In excision wound model, compared to the control group, per cent contraction of wound was significantly higher in A. brasiliana (5% ...

Preventing obesity and cardiovascular disease at early ages is important; however, few effective interventions for early adolescents have been reported. In this study, low-income, culturally diverse students from an urban middle school (n = 60) received four classroom interventions with the use of a combined Health Promotion/Transtheoretical Model to control fat in diet and increase physical ac...

Activities that engage young children with the sensory properties of foods are popular with nursery schools, despite the lack of evidence for their efficacy in increasing children's consumption of healthy foods. This study provides the first empirical exploration of the effectiveness of a non-taste sensory activity program in a nursery school setting. Ninety-two children aged between 12 and 36 ...