Background: Research indicates home-packed school lunches are lower in nutritional value compared with school-provided meals. Due to the lack of a school lunch program, most of what Canadian children consume during the school day is determined by parents and caregivers through packed lunches. Despite this, little research has focused on the school…

Preschool children's interest in popular culture is linked to many determinants of obesity development including branded energy-dense foods and sedentary play using digital technologies. In addition, highly packaged foods and throwaway toys reinforce unsustainable environmental habits encouraged by immersive marketing systems. Interrupting the…

This paper directs attention towards the plethora of ongoing health and well-being initiatives that seek to address young people's participation in physical activity and that are underpinned by interests in youth health. Focusing on contemporary developments in the state of Tasmania and throughout Australia, the paper examines these initiatives by…

The aims of this study were to examine whether adolescent self-efficacy mediates the associations between parental control, perceptions of the importance of healthy nutrition for child health and barriers to buying fruits and vegetables and adolescent fruit consumption using a theoretically derived explanatory model. Data were drawn from a…

Over the past decade the issue of food and in particular, food consumed within schools has come to encapsulate a broad range of concerns regarding children and young people's health and wellbeing. In Australia, the UK and more recently the USA, attempts to ameliorate a range of public health concerns have provided the impetus for an unprecedented…

Purpose: Schools are widely accepted as having the potential to make substantial contributions to promoting healthy eating habits in children and adolescents. This paper aims to present a case study from an Australian school of how a whole-school approach, planned and implemented through a health promoting school framework, can foster improved…

The use of childcare services for very young children (birth to three years) has increased dramatically in the past two decades (Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, 2004). This article investigates the expectations for cultural continuity of caregiving practices (with particular emphasis on sleep and feeding) between…

Based on converging evidence that visual and olfactory images are key components of food cravings, the authors tested a central prediction of the elaborated intrusion theory of desire, that mutual competition between modality-specific tasks and desire-related imagery can suppress such cravings. In each of Experiments 1 and 2, 90 undergraduate…

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of a "single session" group, early intervention, multidisciplinary, education programme (entitled the "Fun not Fuss with Food" group programme) designed to improve children's problem eating and mealtime behaviours. Design: A quasi-experimental time-series design incorporating data…

A large national study of schoolchildren aged 6-18 years was conducted to assess nutritional and socio-cognitive factors associated with body mass index (BMI). A questionnaire was used to assess nutritional quality of breakfast, importance of physical activity and food variety score, among 4441 students from randomly selected schools in all states…