Summary
The majority of children in the United States (US) do not consume the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables for their age and gender. Farm to School (FTS) has been promoted as a strategy to increase consumption of these foods among US schoolchildren in primary and secondary schools (ages 5–19). FTS programmes connect schools to farmers and locally grown foods through a variety of activities that provide nutrition education and exposure to fruits and vegetables. This paper reviews the literature assessing the impact of these programmes on fruit and vegetable consumption among children in the US and makes recommendations for future research to improve knowledge of the efficacy of such approaches.

While FTS programmes are becoming increasingly popular in the US, there is a paucity of peer-reviewed research assessing its overall impact on children's actual consumption of fruits and vegetables. Instead, the majority of literature on FTS has focused on school lunch participation rates and self-reported intake or selection of fruits and vegetables in programme evaluations that are usually self-conducted by individual FTS programmes. These studies tended to use surveys that have not been validated against actual fruit and vegetable consumption and so are not necessarily representative of actual consumption. To a lesser extent, validated self-report dietary assessment methods have been used but these methods are subject to children's misreporting. Based on the types of methods used in most of the current literature on FTS, it is difficult to draw conclusions about its true impact on children's fruit and vegetable consumption. However, continued implementation of FTS is encouraged based on the positive outcomes observed in other school interventions with similarities to FTS. Future studies assessing the impact of FTS on children's dietary behaviour should adopt validated dietary assessment methods to measure fruit and vegetable consumption, especially those that require observation of children's actual intake in order to eliminate errors from children's self-report.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/nbu.12009

Farm to School as a strategy to increase children's fruit and vegetable consumption in the United States: Research and recommendations

Objective To explore the perceptions of soldiers participating in a US Army Office of The Surgeon General's worksite health promotion programme (WHPP) on the local food environment within their campus-style workplace. Design Focus groups were conducted to evaluate the perceived effectiveness of the WHPP implementation. Further exploration of focus group data through thematic analysis focused on perceived contributions of the military campus-style food environment to soldiers' nutrition behaviours. Setting Three US Army installations located in the continental USA. Participants Active duty soldiers (n 366) participating in one of the fifty-eight focus groups. Results Soldiers shared a common belief of self-discipline and personal responsibility as the foothold to nutrition behaviour change. Soldiers described aspects of the military campus-style food environment as factors impeding achievement of optimal nutrition. Collectively, soldiers perceived the proximity and density of fast-food restaurants, lack of healthy alternatives on the installation and the cost of healthy food as inhibitors to choosing healthy foods. Overwhelmingly, soldiers also perceived time constraints as a factor contributing to unhealthy food choices. Conclusions Although nutrition behaviour is individually driven, soldiers perceived the military campus-style food environment inhibits healthy decision making. Nutrition programming in military WHPP must integrate food environment changes to improve soldiers' nutrition behaviour outcomes. Applicable to the military, food choice behaviour studies suggest environmental changes must be appealing to young adults. Considerations for environmental changes should include an increased portion size for healthy options, broadened use of soldiers' daily food allowances on local produce and increased availability of grab-and-go options.

/pdf/nutrition-is-out-of-our-control-soldiers-perceptions-of-2j53m6bq9s.pdf

'Nutrition is out of our control': soldiers' perceptions of their local food environment.

Since 1999, The Arabidopsis Information Resource (www.arabidopsis.org) has been curating data about the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. Its primary focus is integrating experimental gene function information from the peer-reviewed literature and codifying it as controlled vocabulary annotations. Our goal is to produce a ‘gold standard’ functional annotation set that reflects the current state of knowledge about the Arabidopsis genome. At the same time, the resource serves as a nexus for community-based collaborations aimed at improving data quality, access and reuse. For the past decade, our work has been made possible by subscriptions from our global user base. This update covers our ongoing biocuration work, some of our modernization efforts that contribute to the first major infrastructure overhaul since 2011, the introduction of JBrowse2, and the resource’s role in community activities such as organizing the structural reannotation of the genome. For gene function assessment, we used Gene Ontology annotations as a metric to evaluate: (1) what is currently known about Arabidopsis gene function, and (2) the set of ‘unknown’ genes. Currently, 74% of the proteome has been annotated to at least one Gene Ontology term. Of those loci, half have experimental support for at least one of the following aspects: molecular function, biological process, or cellular component. Our work sheds light on the genes for which we have not yet identified any published experimental data and have no functional annotation. Drawing attention to these unknown genes highlights knowledge gaps and potential sources of novel discoveries. Article Summary The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR, www.arabidopsis.org) is a comprehensive website about Arabidopsis thaliana, a small plant that’s very easy to grow and analyze in the laboratory and is used to understand how many other plants function. We share our progress in data collection and organization, website and tool improvement, and our involvement in community projects.

The Arabidopsis Information Resource in 2024

Objectives. We developed the policy indicator checklist (PIC) to identify and measure policies for calorie-dense foods and sugar-sweetened beverages to determine how policies are clustered across multiple settings.Methods. In 2012 and 2013 we used existing literature, policy documents, government recommendations, and instruments to identify key policies. We then developed the PIC to examine the policy environments across 3 settings (communities, schools, and early care and education centers) in 8 communities participating in the Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration Project.Results. Principal components analysis revealed 5 components related to calorie-dense food policies and 4 components related to sugar-sweetened beverage policies. Communities with higher youth and racial/ethnic minority populations tended to have fewer and weaker policy environments concerning calorie-dense foods and healthy foods and beverages.Conclusions. The PIC was a helpful tool to identify policies that promote healthy food en...

Development of the policy indicator checklist: a tool to identify and measure policies for calorie-dense foods and sugar-sweetened beverages across multiple settings.

BACKGROUND Rational planning of community policies and programs (CPPs) to prevent obesity requires an understanding of CPP objectives associated with dietary behaviours. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to identify objectives of CPPs associated with healthful dietary behaviours. METHODS An observational study identified 4026 nutrition CPPs occurring in 130 communities in the prior 6 years. Dietary intakes of fruits and vegetables, added sugar and sugar-sweetened beverages, among others, were reported among 5138 children 4-15 years of age from the communities, using a Dietary Screener Questionnaire with children age 9 years and older (parent assisted) or parent proxies for younger children. CPPs were documented through key informant interviews and characterized by their intensity, count, and objectives including target dietary behaviour and food environment change strategy. Associations between dietary intakes and CPP objectives were assessed using hierarchical statistical models. RESULTS CPPs with the highest intensity scores that targeted fast food or fat intake or provided smaller portions were associated with greater fruit and vegetable intake (0.21, 0.19, 0.23 cup equivalents/day respectively with p values <0.01, 0.04, 0.03). CPPs with the highest intensity scores that restricted the availability of less healthful foods were associated with lower child intakes of total added sugar (-1.08 tsp/day, p < 0.01) and sugar from sugar-sweetened beverages (-1.63 tsp/day, p = 0.04). Similar associations were observed between CPP count and dietary outcomes. No other significant associations were found between CPP target behaviours or environmental strategies and dietary intakes/behaviours. CONCLUSION CPPs that targeted decreases in intakes of less healthful foods and/or aimed to modify the availability of less healthful foods and portions were associated with healthier child dietary behaviours.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ijpo.12424

Objectives of community policies and programs associated with more healthful dietary intakes among children: findings from the Healthy Communities Study.

This final rule incorporates into the regulations governing the Programs authorized under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act (NSLA) and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 (CNA) two nondiscretionary provisions of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFK Act). The HHFK Act requires State and local cooperation in Department of Agriculture studies and evaluations related to Programs authorized under the NSLA and the CNA. The HHFK Act also amends the NSLA to stipulate that Federal funds must not be subject to State budget restrictions or limitations, including hiring freezes, work furloughs, and travel restrictions. This final rule amends regulations for the National School Lunch Program; the Special Milk Program for Children; the School Breakfast Program; the Summer Food Service Program; the Child and Adult Care Food Program; State Administrative Expense Funds ; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children; and the WIC Farmers' Market Nutrition Program. These provisions will strengthen program integrity by ensuring that sufficient data is made available for studies and evaluations. Additionally, exempting Federal funds from State budgetary restrictions or limitations is intended to increase the ability of State agencies to administer USDA's nutrition assistance programs effectively.

Cooperation in USDA studies and evaluations, and full use of federal funds in nutrition assistance programs nondiscretionary provisions of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, Public Law 111-296. Final Rule.

The GFF3 format is a common, flexible tab-delimited format representing the structure and function of genes or other mapped features (https://github.com/The-SequenceOntology/Specifications/blob/master/gff3.md). However, with increasing re-use of annotation data, this flexibility has become an obstacle for standardized downstream processing. Common software packages that export annotations in GFF3 format model the same data and metadata in different notations, which puts the burden on end-users to interpret the data model. The AgBioData consortium is a group of genomics, genetics and breeding databases and partners working towards shared practices and standards. Providing concrete guidelines for generating GFF3, and creating a standard representation of the most common biological data types would provide a major increase in efficiency for AgBioData databases and the genomics research community that use the GFF3 format in their daily operations. The AgBioData GFF3 working group has developed recommendations to solve common problems in the GFF3 format. We suggest improvements for each of the GFF3 fields, as well as the special cases of modeling functional annotations, and standard protein-coding genes. We welcome further discussion of these recommendations. We request the genomics and bioinformatics community to utilize the github repository (https://github.com/NALi5K/AgBioData_GFF3_recommendation) to provide feedback via issues or pull requests.

pdf/recommendations-for-extending-the-gff3-specification-for-1vv8d12q.pdf

Recommendations for extending the GFF3 specification for improved interoperability of genomic data

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Cooperation in USDA studies and evaluations, and full use of federal funds in nutrition assistance programs nondiscretionary provisions of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, Public Law 111-296. Final Rule.

Recommendations for extending the GFF3 specification for improved interoperability of genomic data