Ticks are obligate blood-feeding arachnids. During their long-lasting blood meal, they have to counteract the protective barriers and defense mechanisms of their host. These include tissue integrity, pain, hemostasis, and the inflammatory and immune reactions. Here, we describe a multigene family coding for five putative salivary metalloproteases induced during the blood meal of Ixodes ricinus....

BACKGROUND Overweight epidemics, including among children and adolescents, are fuelled by contemporary obesogenic environments. Recent research and theory highlight the importance of socio-cultural factors in mitigating adverse impacts of the abundance of food in high-income countries. The current study examines whether family meal culture shapes young people's eating behaviors and self-regulat...

BACKGROUND Dietary habits are linked to high maternal glucose levels, associated with preterm delivery. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between meal frequency and glycemic properties of maternal diet in relation to preterm delivery. METHODS This prospective cohort study included 66,000 women from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). Meal frequency and food...

Trained, unanaesthetised dogs with jejunal fistula and adapted to 2 h meal-time showed transient taste-correlated changes in pressure (mm H2O) but not in frequency of intestinal motility. Intestinal pressure was increased on bitter taste both before meal-time (4.7 +/- 0.2 mm) and after it (13.1 +/- 0.9 mm) over respective basal pressure (before meal 3.2 +/- 0.4 mm), after meal 10.6 +/- 1.4 mm),...

OBJECTIVE To describe shared meal patterns and examine associations with dietary intake among young adults. DESIGN Population-based, longitudinal cohort study (Project EAT: Eating and Activity in Teens and Young Adults). SETTING Participants completed surveys and FFQ in high-school classrooms in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, USA in 1998-1999 (mean age = 15·0 years, 'adolescence') and follow-up ...

The relation between meal frequency and the risk of colorectal cancer was investigated in a case-control study conducted in North Italy on 889 cases of colon cancer, 581 cases of rectal cancer, and 2475 controls admitted to hospital for acute, nonneoplastic, or digestive disorders. As compared to individuals who reported 2 or fewer meals per day, the mull¡variatecolon cancer odds ratios were 1...

The present paper presents a certain number of cultural elements which interact in the determination of the frequency of food intake. Approaches from various perspectives (historical, ethnological, anthropological, sociological) draw attention to two major aspects relating to the periodicity of food intake: the extreme cultural diversity and the continual modifications which have occurred over ...