World Health Organization dietary norms: a quantitative evaluation of potential consumption impacts in the United States, United Kingdom, and France

The member countries of the World Health Organization have endorsed its Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity, and Health. We assess the potential consumption impacts of these norms in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom using a mathematical programming approach. We find that adherence would involve large reductions in the consumption of fats and oils accompanying large rises in the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and cereal. Further, in the United Kingdom and the United States, but not France, sugar intakes would have to shrink considerably. Focusing on sub-populations within each country, we find that the least educated, not necessarily the poorest, would have to bear the highest burden of adjustment.

Food consumption impacts of adherence to dietary norms in the United States: a quantitative assessment

Promotion of adherence to healthy-eating norms has become an important element of nutrition policy in the United States and other developed countries. We assess the potential consumption impacts of adherence to a set of recommended dietary norms in the United States using a mathematical programming approach. We find that adherence to recommended dietary norms would involve significant changes in diets, with large reductions in the consumption of fats and oils along with large increases in the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and cereals. Compliance with norms recommended by the World Health Organization for energy derived from sugar would involve sharp reductions in sugar intakes. We also analyze how dietary adjustments required vary across demographic groups. Most socio-demographic characteristics appear to have relatively little influence on the pattern of adjustment required to comply with norms, Income levels have little effect on required dietary adjustments. Education is the only characteristic to have a significant influence on the magnitude of adjustments required. The least educated rather than the poorest have to bear the highest burden of adjustment. Out- analysis suggests that fiscal measures like nutrient-based taxes may not be as regressive as commonly believed. Dissemination of healthy-eating norms to the less educated will be a key challenge for nutrition policy.

Food consumption impacts of adherence to dietary norms in the United States: a quantitative assessment

Promotion of adherence to healthy-eating norms has become an important element of nutrition policy in the United States and other developed countries. We assess the potential consumption impacts of adherence to a set of recommended dietary norms in the United States using a mathematical programming approach. We find that adherence to recommended dietary norms would involve significant changes in diets, with large reductions in the consumption of fats and oils along with large increases in the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and cereals. Compliance with norms recommended by the World Health Organization for energy derived from sugar would involve sharp reductions in sugar intakes. We also analyze how dietary adjustments required vary across demographic groups. Most socio-demographic characteristics appear to have relatively little influence on the pattern of adjustment required to comply with norms, Income levels have little effect on required dietary adjustments. Education is the only characteristic to have a significant influence on the magnitude of adjustments required. The least educated rather than the poorest have to bear the highest burden of adjustment. Out- analysis suggests that fiscal measures like nutrient-based taxes may not be as regressive as commonly believed. Dissemination of healthy-eating norms to the less educated will be a key challenge for nutrition policy.

An assessment of the potential consumption impacts of WHO dietary norms in OECD countries

The member countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) have recently endorsed its global strategy on diet, physical activity and health. The strategy emphasises the need to limit the consumption of saturated fats and trans-fatty acids, salt and sugars, and to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables in order to combat the growing burden of non-communicable diseases. This paper attempts a broad quantitative assessment of the consumption impacts of these norms in OECD countries using a mathematical programming approach. We find that adherence to the WHO norms would involve a significant decrease in the consumption of vegetable oils (30%), dairy products (28%), sugar (24%), animal fats (30%) and meat (pig meat, 13.5%, mutton and goat 14.5%) and a significant increase in the human consumption of cereals (31%), fruits (25%) and vegetables (21%). (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Plane wave discontinuous Galerkin methods for the 2D Helmholtz equation: analysis of the $p$-version

Plane wave discontinuous Galerkin (PWDG) methods are a class of Trefftz-type methods for the spatial discretization of boundary value problems for the Helmholtz operator $-\Delta-\omega^2$, $\omega>0$. They include the so-called ultra weak variational formulation from [O. Cessenat and B. Després, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 35 (1998), pp. 255–299]. This paper is concerned with the a priori convergence analysis of PWDG in the case of $p$-refinement, that is, the study of the asymptotic behavior of relevant error norms as the number of plane wave directions in the local trial spaces is increased. For convex domains in two space dimensions, we derive convergence rates, employing mesh skeleton-based norms, duality techniques from [P. Monk and D. Wang, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 175 (1999), pp. 121–136], and plane wave approximation theory.

A comparison of duality and energy a posteriori estimates for $\mathrm {L}_{\infty }(0,T;\mathrm {L}_2(\varOmega ))$ in parabolic problems

We use the elliptic reconstruction technique in combination with a duality approach to prove a posteriori error estimates for fully discrete backward Euler scheme for linear parabolic equations. As an application, we combine our result with the residual based estimators from the a posteriori estimation for elliptic problems to derive space-error indicators and thus a fully practical version of the estimators bounding the error in the $ \mathrm {L}_{\infty }(0,T;\mathrm {L}_2(\varOmega ))$ norm. These estimators, which are of optimal order, extend those introduced by Eriksson and Johnson in 1991 by taking into account the error induced by the mesh changes and allowing for a more flexible use of the elliptic estimators. For comparison with previous results we derive also an energy-based a posteriori estimate for the $ \mathrm {L}_{\infty }(0,T;\mathrm {L}_2(\varOmega ))$-error which simplifies a previous one given by Lakkis and Makridakis in 2006. We then compare both estimators (duality vs. energy) in practical situations and draw conclusions.

Realising the cup product of local Tate duality

We present an explicit description, in terms of central simple algebras, of a cup product map which occurs in the statement of local Tate duality for Galois modules of prime cardinality p. Given cocycles f and g, we construct a central simple algebra of dimension p^2 whose class in the Brauer group gives the cup product f\cup g. This algebra is as small as possible.

La confrontation de la laideur avec la beauté dans lesromans Mercure et Attentat. Une étude sur lareprésentation de la dualité thématique laideur-beautéchez Amélie Nothomb. : "Where there is Quasimodo, there is also Esmeralda." The confrontationbetween ugliness and beauty in the novels Mercure and Attentat. Astudy on the representation of the duality beauty-ugliness in the worksof Amélie Nothomb.

This paper studies one of the recurrent topics of writing found in Amélie Nothomb’snovels: beauty and ugliness. The novels Mercure and Attentat are analyzed in detail,with respect to figures of speech used to describe the extreme physical appearance ofthe protagonists and the role of the duality beauty-ugliness in the advancement of theplot.