Despite the fact that the majority of adults in the U.S. are overweight, discrimination on the basis of weight occurs in making a choice of a sexual partner. Males particularly make choices of partner based on their weight. Obesity stigma may specifically affect women in sexual relationships. Weight-related stigma needs to be addressed in the treatment of binge eating disorder or weight management. Finding ways to change attitudes and behavior toward the overweight is a goal for future research in the area.

The goal of drought-related weather index insurance (WII) is to protect smallholder farmers against the risk of weather shocks and to increase their agricultural productivity. Estimates of precipitation and vegetation greenness are the two dominant satellite datasets. However, ignoring additional moisture- and energy-related processes that influence the response of vegetation to rainfall leads to an incomplete representation of the hydrologic cycle. This study evaluates the added value of considering multiple independent satellite-based variables to design, calibrate, and validate weather insurance indices on the African continent. The satellite data include two rainfall datasets, soil moisture, the evaporative stress index (ESI), and vegetation greenness. We limit artificial advantages by resampling all datasets to the same spatial (0.25°) and temporal (monthly) resolution, although datasets with a higher spatial resolution might have an added value, if considered as the single source of information for localized applications. A higher correlation coefficient between the moisture-focused variables and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), an indicator for vegetation vigor, provides evidence for the datasets’ capability to capture agricultural drought conditions on the ground. The Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) rainfall dataset, soil moisture, and ESI show higher correlations with the (lagged) NDVI in large parts of Africa, for different land covers and various climate zones, than the African Rainfall Climatology, version 2 (ARC2), rainfall dataset, which is often used in WII. A comparison to drought years as reported by farmers in Ethiopia, Senegal, and Zambia indicates a high “hit rate” of all satellite-derived anomalies regarding the detection of severe droughts but limitations regarding moderate drought events.

Food systems are at the center of a brewing storm consisting of a rapidly changing climate, rising hunger and malnutrition and significant social inequities. At the same time, there are vast opportunities to ensure that food systems produce healthy and safe food in equitable ways that promote environmental sustainability, especially if the world can come together at the UN Food Systems Summit in late 2021 and make strong and binding commitments towards food system transformation. The NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard and the Harvard Medical School Division of Nutrition held their 22nd Annual Harvard Nutrition Obesity Symposium entitled “Global Food Systems and Sustainable Nutrition in the 21st Century” in June 2021. This paper presents a synthesis of this symposium and highlights the importance of food systems to address the burden of malnutrition and non-communicable diseases, climate change, and the economic and social inequities. Transformation of food systems is possible, and the nutrition and health communities have a significant role to play in this transformative process.

Given that smallholder farmers are frequently food insecure and rely significantly on rain-fed agriculture, it is critical to examine climate variability and food insecurity. We utilize data from smallholder farmer surveys from 12 countries with 30 years of rainfall data to examine how rainfall variability and household resources are correlated with food security. We find that on average, households that experienced a drier than average year are 3.81 months food insecure, while households within a normal range of rainfall were 3.67 months food insecure, and wetter than average households were 2.86 months food insecure. Reduced odds of food insecurity is associated with agricultural inputs, ownership of livestock, water use efficiency, financial services, and participation in a group. However, in drier than average households, financial services as compared to agricultural inputs and agroecological practices have a greater prevalence of reduced instances of food insecurity, while agricultural inputs are more common for reduced food insecurity in wetter than average households. Only the use of fertilizer consistently results in reduced odds of food insecurity across all households regardless of rainfall, demonstrating that one-size fits all approaches to food security interventions are likely ineffective, and place-specific interventions considering climatic factors are critically important.

Orbital drift results in late equatorial crossing times for the afternoon National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) polar satellites and in changes of illumination that affect measurements made by the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR). Processing and correcting for calibration variation(s) and atmospheric effects have improved, but one of the standard AVHRR products, the normalized difference vegetation index (N D V I) , may still contain variations due to orbital drift or changes in sun-target-sensor geometry. In this study, the solar zenith angle (SZA) trends associated with orbital drift are identified and analyzed with respect to their effects on the N D V I. The adaptive empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is used to identify and remove the induced artifacts from the N D V I time series. The EMD is based on the local characteristic time scale of the data and is used to identify embedded nonlinear and nonstationary variation. Trend artifacts associated with drift were uncoupled from the surface signal, and their contributions were quantified at all latitudes. The approach was tested on 1 degree and 8-km N D V I global datasets, and showed that it is very suitable for addressing the long-standing issues of orbital shifting or the inconsistencies of the AVHRR data among sensors. The results showed that the interference of satellite drift artifacts with the surface signal was (i) large in a tropical forest, (ii) moderate in the tropics for less-densely vegetated areas, and (iii) lowest at higher northern and lower southern latitudes.