A dietary pattern of frequent plant-based foods intake reduced the associated risks for atopic dermatitis exacerbation: Insights from the Singapore/Malaysia cross-sectional genetics epidemiology cohort

BACKGROUND

The prevalence of atopic dermatitis (AD) has been increasing in recent years, especially in Asia. There is growing evidence to suggest the importance of dietary patterns in the development and management of AD. Here, we seek to understand how certain dietary patterns in a Singapore/Malaysia population are associated with various risks of AD development and exacerbation.

METHODS

A standardized questionnaire following the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) guidelines was investigator-administered to a clinically and epidemiology well-defined allergic cohort of 13,561 young Chinese adults aged 19-22. Information on their sociodemographic, lifestyle, dietary habits, and personal and family medical atopic histories were obtained. Allergic sensitization was assessed by a skin prick test to mite allergens. Spearman's rank-order correlation was used to assess the correlation between the intake frequencies of 16 food types. Dietary patterns were identified using principal component analysis. Four corresponding dietary scores were derived to examine the association of identified dietary patterns with allergic sensitization and AD exacerbations through a multivariable logistic regression that controlled for age, gender, parental eczema, BMI, and lifestyle factors.

RESULTS

The correlation is the strongest between the intake of butter and margarine (R = 0.65). We identified four dietary patterns, "high-calorie foods", "plant-based foods", "meat and rice", and "probiotics, milk and eggs", and these accounted for 47.4% of the variance in the dietary habits among the subjects. Among these patterns, moderate-to-high intake of "plant-based foods" conferred a negative association for chronic (Adjusted odds ratio (AOR): 0.706; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.589-0.847; p < 0.001) and moderate-to-severe AD (AOR: 0.756; 95% CI: 0.638-0.897; p < 0.01). "Meat and rice" and "probiotics, milk and eggs" were not significantly associated with AD exacerbation. While frequent adherence to "high-calorie foods" increased the associated risks for ever AD and moderate-to-severe AD, having a higher adherence to "plant-based foods" diminished the overall associated risks.

CONCLUSIONS

Frequent adherence to "plant-based foods" was associated with reduced risks for AD exacerbation in young Chinese adults from Singapore/Malaysia. This provides the initial evidence to support the association between dietary factors and AD. Further research is needed to better understand the pathomechanisms underlying diet and AD exacerbations.

Food practices among adolescents in German residential care. Findings from a quantitative survey

Food is of great importance for socialization. So far, there are few quantitative studies analysing food practices in residential care. The aim of this paper was to describe individual food practices in these homes. Associations with sociodemographic and home-related characteristics as well as attitudes towards food were examined to identify differences between adolescents following different food practices. 400 young people aged between 12 and 21 years living in 67 residential care homes in Germany completed a standardized questionnaire. Food practices were operationalized by questions on the regularity of meals, company at meals and the eating location. Cluster analysis for types of food practices were conducted. Differences by home-related and sociodemographic characteristics as well as attitudes towards food were tested by logistic regression analyses. Two types of food practices were identified which differed regarding to age, duration of stay, and the importance as well as impact of eating on well-being: the independents (29%) and the embedded (71%). In comparison to the embedded, the independents ate fewer regular meals and eat in the homes less often, but more often alone. Furthermore, the independents were older, give less meaning to food and have more money available for food. Age was found to be an important variable that indicated increasing independence of adolescents. Food practices should therefore be discussed and reflected pedagogically in the care homes.

Food is special by itself: Neither valence, arousal, food appeal, nor caloric content modulate the attentional bias induced by food images

When food cues appear in a visual context, such information is likely to influence eating behavior by enhancing attention for food cues. We investigated whether active but task-irrelevant information could modulate the attentional bias for food stimuli using a novel paradigm in which participants were purposely deceived by being enrolled in a memory experiment. A set of images were first held in working memory and then used as task-irrelevant distractors in a subsequent single target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, allowing us to investigate the attentional blink (AB) effect elicited by those images. In Experiment 1, the results revealed that food images elicited a larger AB effect than nonfood images. In three follow-up experiments, we investigated whether valence or arousal (Experiment 2), food preparation (Experiment 3), or food caloric content (Experiment 4) were factors related to the attentional bias for food. Overall, our results demonstrated that when held in working memory, food images can easily capture attention, even in circumstances in which the information retained in memory is irrelevant to solve the task, as indicated by the strong correlation found between items that were recognized in the RSVP task and the AB effect. Nonetheless, none of the food-related properties we examined were found to be associated with this attentional bias for food.

Combined effects of ZnO nanoparticles and toxic Microcystis on life-history traits of Daphnia magna

Rise in cyanobacterial blooms and massive discharge of nanoparticles (NPs) in aquatic ecosystems cause zooplankton to be exposed in toxic food and NPs simultaneously, which may impact on zooplankton interactively. Therefore, the present study focused on assessing the combined effects of different ZnO NPs levels (0, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20 mg L^-1) and different proportions of toxic Microcystis (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%) in the food on a model zooplankton, Daphnia magna. The results showed that both toxic Microcystis and ZnO NPs significantly delayed the development of D. magna to maturation, but there was no significant interaction between the two factors on the times to maturation except the body length at maturation. Both ZnO NPs and toxic Microcystis also significantly decreased the number of neonates in the first brood, total offspring, and number of broods per female, and there was a significant interaction between ZnO NPs and food composition on the reproductive performance of D. magna. Specifically, presence of toxic Microcystis reduced the gap among the effects of different ZnO NPs concentrations on the reproductive performance of D. magna. When the ZnO NPs concentration was at 0.15 mg L^-1, the gap of the reproductive performance among different proportions of toxic Microcystis also tended to be narrow. Similar phenomenon also occurred in mortality. Such results suggested that low concentration of ZnO NPs and toxic Microcystis can mutually attenuate their harmful effects on D. magna, which has significantly implications in appropriately assessing the ecotoxicological effects of emerging pollutants in a complex food conditions.