Background Our interdisciplinary team developed a publicly available online game—Eat and Move as I Like (EAMAIL)—for tweens based on the MyPlate evidence-based representation of the Dietary Guidelines. Objective We aimed to test the... more
Background Our interdisciplinary team developed a publicly available online game—Eat and Move as I Like (EAMAIL)—for tweens based on the MyPlate evidence-based representation of the Dietary Guidelines. Objective We aimed to test the feasibility of using EAMAIL in a classroom setting to promote engagement and self-awareness and motivate healthier diet behaviors in tweens. Methods Teachers in one middle school offered EAMAIL on school Chromebooks (institutional review board–approved). The researcher introduced EAMAIL’s login instructions, including nonidentifiable usernames, basic demographics, and home zip codes. Children were instructed to enter EAMAIL’s Story Mode, which had 5 MyPlate-food group levels; children caught healthy foods in color-matching buckets and avoided sweets. Each level delivers informational and motivational messages, asking users to report liking or disliking food groups and making dietary improvements on 7-point facial hedonic scales (from Love it to It’s okay...
Taste and oral sensations vary in humans. Some of this variation has a genetic basis, and two commonly measured phenotypes are the bitterness of propylthiouracil (PROP) and the number of fungiform papillae on the anterior tongue. While... more
Taste and oral sensations vary in humans. Some of this variation has a genetic basis, and two commonly measured phenotypes are the bitterness of propylthiouracil (PROP) and the number of fungiform papillae on the anterior tongue. While the genetic control of fungiform papilla is unclear, PROP bitterness associates with allelic variation in the taste receptor gene, TAS2R38. The two common