No abstract

Improving diet quality while simultaneously reducing environmental impact is a critical focus globally. Metrics linking diet quality and sustainability have typically focused on a limited suite of indicators, and have not included food waste. To address this important research gap, we examine the relationship between food waste, diet quality, nutrient waste, and multiple measures of sustainability: use of cropland, irrigation water, pesticides, and fertilizers. Data on food intake, food waste, and application rates of agricultural amendments were collected from diverse US government sources. Diet quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index-2015. A biophysical simulation model was used to estimate the amount of cropland associated with wasted food. This analysis finds that US consumers wasted 422g of food per person daily, with 30 million acres of cropland used to produce this food every year. This accounts for 30% of daily calories available for consumption, one-quarter of daily food (by weight) available for consumption, and 7% of annual cropland acreage. Higher quality diets were associated with greater amounts of food waste and greater amounts of wasted irrigation water and pesticides, but less cropland waste. This is largely due to fruits and vegetables, which are health-promoting and require small amounts of cropland, but require substantial amounts of agricultural inputs. These results suggest that simultaneous efforts to improve diet quality and reduce food waste are necessary. Increasing consumers’ knowledge about how to prepare and store fruits and vegetables will be one of the practical solutions to reducing food waste.

Findings suggest that how we deal with children's overweight may have implications for the future psychological health of a considerable proportion of US children.

Resonance Raman spectroscopy (RRS) and reflection spectroscopy (RS) are optical methods applicable to the non-invasive detection of carotenoids in human skin. RRS is the older, more thoroughly validated method, whereas RS is newer and has several advantages. Since collective skin carotenoid levels serve as a biomarker for vegetable and fruit intake, both methods hold promise as convenient screening tools for assessment of dietary interventions and correlations between skin carotenoids and health and disease outcomes. In this manuscript, we describe the most recent optimized device configurations and compare their use in various clinical and field settings. Both RRS and RS devices yield a wide range of skin carotenoid levels between subjects, which is a critical feature for a biomarker. Repeatability of the methods is 3-15% depending on the subject's skin carotenoid level and the uniformity of its local distribution. For 54 subjects recruited from an ophthalmology clinic, we first checked the validity of the relatively novel RS methodology via biochemical serum carotenoid measurements, the latter carried out with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). A high correlation between RS skin and serum HPLC carotenoid levels was established (R = 0.81; p < 0.001). Also, a high correlation was found between RS and RRS skin levels (R = 0.94 p < 0.001). Subsequent comparisons of skin carotenoid measurements in diverse age groups and ethnicities included 569 Japanese adults, 947 children with ages 2-5 screened in 24 day care centers in San Francisco, and 49 predominantly Hispanic adults screened at an outdoor health fair event. Depending on the particular subject group, correlation coefficients between the RRS and RS methods ranged between R ∼0.80 and R ∼0.96. Analysis of the Japanese screening showed that, on average, skin carotenoid levels are higher in women compared to men, skin levels do not depend on age, and tobacco smokers have reduced levels versus non-smokers. For the two most ethnically diverse groups with widely varying melanin levels, we investigated the effect of dermal melanin on RS and RRS skin carotenoid levels. The analysis revealed that large variations in skin carotenoid levels remain detectable independent of the particular melanin index. This behavior is consistent with the absence of melanin effects on the skin carotenoid levels generated with the instrument configurations. The RS method has an advantage over RRS in its relative simplicity. Due to its detection of skin reflection over a wide spectral range from the near UV to the near IR, it has the unique ability to quantify each of the major tissue chromophores and take them into account in the derivation of skin carotenoid levels.