Chronic Diseases: Chronic Diseases and Development 2 Health, agricultural, and economic effects of adoption of healthy diet recommendations

Transition to diets that are high in saturated fat and sugar has caused a global public health concern as the pattern of food consumption is a mayor modifiable risk factor for chronic non-communicable diseases Although agri food systems are intimately associated with this transition, agriculture and health sectors are largely disconnected in their priorities policy, and analysis with neither side considering the complex inter relation between agri trade patterns of food consumption health, and development We show the importance of connection of these perspectives through estimation of the effect of adopting a healthy diet on population health, agricultural production trade the economy and livelihoods, with a computable general equilibrium approach On the basis of case studies from the UK and Brazil we suggest that benefits of a healthy diet policy will vary substantially between different populations, not only because of population dietary intake but also because of agricultural production trade and other economic factors

Concentric characterization and classification of complex network nodes: Application to an institutional collaboration network

Differently from theoretical scale-free networks, most real networks present multi-scale behavior, with nodes structured in different types of functional groups and communities. While the majority of approaches for classification of nodes in a complex network has relied on local measurements of the topology/connectivity around each node, valuable information about node functionality can be obtained by concentric (or hierarchical) measurements. This paper extends previous methodologies based on concentric measurements, by studying the possibility of using agglomerative clustering methods, in order to obtain a set of functional groups of nodes, considering particular institutional collaboration network nodes, including various known communities (departments of the University of Sao Paulo). Among the interesting obtained findings, we emphasize the scale-free nature of the network obtained, as well as identification of different patterns of authorship emerging from different areas (e.g. human and exact sciences). Another interesting result concerns the relatively uniform distribution of hubs along concentric levels, contrariwise to the non-uniform pattern found in theoretical scale-free networks such as the BA model. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.