Food Habit

... Andrew 6. Taber The Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx Zoo, 185th Street and Southern Boulevard, Bronx, New York 10460, USA Andres J. Novaro ... 1990, Jorgenson & Red-ford 1993, Rabinowitz & Nottingham 1986, Ter-borgh 1988), but the trophic interactions between ...

To develop and test nutrition messages and supporting content with low-income mothers for use with theory-based interventions addressing fruit and vegetable consumption and child-feeding practices.Six formative and 6 evaluative focus groups explored message concepts and tested messages, respectively.Research facilities in Maryland, Texas, California, Florida, North Carolina, New York, Alabama, and Illinois.Ninety-five low-income mothers of 2- to 5-year-old children; over half from households participating in a federal nutrition assistance program.Preference for and comprehension of nutrition messages.Qualitative data analysis procedures to generate common themes from transcripts and observers' notes.Messages on role modeling, cooking and eating together, having patience when introducing new food items, and allowing children to serve themselves were well received. Mothers preferred messages that emphasized their role as a teacher and noted benefits such as their children becoming more independent and learning new skills. Mothers commonly doubted children's ability to accurately report when they are “full” and disliked messages encouraging mothers to allow children to “decide” whether and how much to eat.This study generated 7 audience-tested messages for incorporation into nutrition education interventions targeting low-income mothers of preschool-age children.

The feeding habits of the common thresher shark (Alopias superciliosus) from the Pacific coast of Ecuador were investigated by using frequency of ocurrence, numeric and gravimetric methods. A total of 122 individuals were collected from July to December 2003 and grouped by sex and maturity state (mature vs. inmature). Stomach contents were examined and classified by components to infer trophic relations. A total of 27 prey taxa were observed as part of the diet of Alopias superciliosus. Overall, Larimus argenteus (RII=1497) was the most important in the diet, followed by Merluccius gayi (RII=333), Dosidicus gigas (RII=281) and Benthosema panamense (RII=239). The Levin’s index allowed to define A. superciliosus as an specialist predator that feeds in oceanic waters.

2 A B S T R A C T Vitamins are essential to life. Inadequate eating habits, high caloric intake and metabolic defects lead to micronutrient deficiencies, affecting more than two billion people worldwide. The increasing intake of industrialized foods, combined with low vitamin stability has led to the common practice of adding these nutrients to processed foods. This review

We explored predator specialization by examining dietary variation in the widespread North American long-nosed snake, Rhinocheilus lecontei. We examined the stomach contents of more than 800 museum specimens, and supplemented our findings with published dietary records. Sixty-six percent of 135 prey eaten by R. lecontei were lizards, 26% were mammals, and 7% were squamate eggs; teiid lizards of the genus Cnemidophorus comprised 72% (64 of 89) of all lizard prey. Ninety-four percent of specimens with food contained a single item, and all 79 prey for which we determined direction of ingestion were swallowed head-first. Among those specimens containing food, long-nosed snakes from Mexico were significantly larger, and ate a higher percentage of mammals, than specimens from the United States. Larger R. lecontei sometimes fed on larger prey, and perhaps excluded smaller prey from their diet. To assess relative trophic niche breadth for R. lecontei, we compared the percentage of lizards and of Cnemidophorus in the diet of long-nosed snakes with the percentage with which other terrestrial snakes consumed lizards as their modal prey, and with which these same snakes ate members of their preferred lizard prey genus. Although we uncovered no statistical basis for labelling R. lecontei a specialist, its diet may often be restricted to lizards and even to Cnemidophorus, and therefore recognizing long-nosed snakes as specialist predators remains a subjective decision. Our study also demonstrates that quantitative natural history can place related species in a resource use continuum, and thereby can help to elucidate the evolutionary basis for specialization.

Objective:To identify the differences in food habits and preferences among the adolescents according to socio-demographic characteristics.Design:Cross-sectional, cluster design survey in 2002.Setting:Eight middle schools in two distinct socio-economic areas of the Jiangsu province, China.Subjects:Some 824 young adolescents (12–14 y) attending public schools with a response rate of 99%.Methods:A self-administered questionnaire containing questions on food and meal frequencies, food preferences and socio-demographic

Nutrition and food intake are closely related to nutritional status and health of an individual. The university students are generally occupied with academic work, games and are under emotional stress which coupled with unbalanced diets, results in poor health and nutrition. Different researches indicate that there are several factors which affects the nutritional status of the students. Among those factors, food habit is a major one. The food habits are formed by attitudes, prejudices and taboos practiced in early days or the life. Thus, this study was conducted to assess the effect of food habit on the nutritional status of the female university students. A non-interventional descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted with 201 selected female university students. The students were selected randomly for the study. Respondent's food behavior shows that more than one-third of the respondents like fast food. The nutritional status of the respondents shows that nearly 20% of total respondents were either overweight or obese. Significant association was found among food type and frequency of meal with nutritional status. The findings show that there is significant association among food type and frequency of meal with nutritional status of the female university students. Thus, this study recommends conducting similar type of study with larger sample size to generalize the findings.

We examined the relative roles of dominance in agonistic interactions and energetic constraints related to body size in determining local abundances of coyotes (Canis latrans, 8–20 kg), gray foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus, 3–5 kg) and bobcats (Felis rufus, 5–15 kg) at three study sites (hereafter referred to as NP, CP, and SP) in the Santa Monica Mountains of California. We hypothesized that the largest and behaviorally dominant species, the coyote, would exploit a wider range of resources (i.e., a higher number of habitat and/or food types) and, consequently, would occur in higher density than the other two carnivores. We evaluated our hypotheses by quantifying their diets, food overlap, habitat-specific abundances, as well as their overall relative abundance at the three study sites. We identified behavioral dominance of coyotes over foxes and bobcats in Santa Monica because 7 of 12 recorded gray fox deaths and 2 of 5 recorded bobcat deaths were due to coyote predation, and no coyotes died as a result of their interactions with bobcats or foxes. Coyotes and bobcats were present in a variety of habitats types (8 out of 9), including both open and brushy habitats, whereas gray foxes were chiefly restricted to brushy habitats. There was a negative relationship between the abundances of coyotes and gray foxes (P=0.020) across habitats, suggesting that foxes avoided habitats of high coyote predation risk. Coyote abundance was low in NP, high in CP, and intermediate in SP. Bobcat abundance changed little across study sites, and gray foxes were very abundant in NP, absent in CP, and scarce in SP; this suggests a negative relationship between coyote and fox abundances across study sites, as well. Bobcats were solely carnivorous, relying on small mammals (lagomorphs and rodents) throughout the year and at all three sites. Coyotes and gray foxes also relied on small mammals year-round at all sites, though they also ate significant amounts of fruit. Though there were strong overall interspecific differences in food habits of carnivores (P<0.0001), average seasonal food overlaps were high due to the importance of small mammals in all carnivore diets [bobcat-gray fox: 0.79±0.09 (SD), n=4; bobcat-coyote: 0.69±0.16, n=6; coyote-gray fox: 0.52±0.05, n=4]. As hypothesized, coyotes used more food types and more habitat types than did bobcats and gray foxes and, overall, coyotes were the most abundant of the three species and ranged more widely than did gray foxes. We propose that coyotes limit the number and distribution of gray foxes in Santa Monica Mountains, and that those two carnivores exemplified a case in which the relationship between their body size and local abundance is governed by competitive dominance of the largest species rather than by energetic equivalences. However, in the case of the intermediate-sized bobcat no such a pattern emerged, likely due to rarity or inconsistency of agonistic interactions and/or behavioral avoidance of encounters by subordinate species.

I reviewed dietary information,of 25 species of small mammals,inhabiting Chile and published,in 11 scientific articles. I divided the contribution of each food item in five categories: fungi, vegetation, seeds, fruits and insects. This approach ,allowed ,me to ,represent ,the information ,documented ,in the ,form ,of De ,Finetti diagrams, in which the trophic position of a species is represented by

Knowledge of traditional African foods and food habits has been, and continues to be, systematically extirpated. With the primary intent of collating data for our online collection documenting traditional African foods and food habits (available at: www.healthyeatingclub.com/Africa/), we reviewed the Oltersdorf Collection, 75 observational investigations conducted throughout East Africa (i.e. Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda) between the 1930s and 1960s as compiled by the Max Planck Nutrition Research Unit, formerly located in Bumbuli, Tanzania. Data were categorized as follows: (1) food availability, (2) chemical composition, (3) staple foods (i.e. native crops, cereals, legumes, roots and tubers, vegetables, fruits, spices, oils and fats, beverages, and animal foods), (4) food preparation and culture, and (5) nutrient intake and health status indicators. Many of the traditional foods identified, including millet, sorghum, various legumes, root and tubers, green leafy vegetables, plant ...