Publications by authors named "Tracy A McCaffrey"

Background: Inconsistent epidemiologic findings on the associations of chrononutrition behaviors with diet quality and adiposity measures may be due to the use of different dietary assessment methodologies and a lack of consideration of dietary misreporting. We aimed to investigate the associations by using questionnaires and diaries, with adjustment for energy intake (EI) misreporting.

Methods: This cross-sectional study included 1047 Japanese adults aged 20-69 years.

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Background: A growing number of studies have investigated chrononutrition-related variables in relation to health outcomes. However, only a few questionnaires specifically designed for assessing chrononutrition-related parameters have been validated. We aimed to examine the relative validity of the Chrono-Nutrition Behavior Questionnaire (CNBQ) against 11-day event-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) diaries of eating.

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The aim of this study was to determine whether the effects of extreme but discrete PM2.5 exposure from a coal mine fire on respiratory symptoms abated, persisted, or worsened over time, and whether they were exacerbated by COVID-19. We analysed longitudinal survey data from a cohort residing near a 2014 coalmine fire in regional Australia.

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Undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies such as anemia are considered significant public health challenges in Bangladesh, which enhancing fish consumption is a well-established food-based intervention to address these. This paper documents the establishment of community-based fish chutney production and reports the impact of its consumption on mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) and hemoglobin (Hb) levels among targeted 150 pregnant and lactating women (PLW) in rural Bangladesh. A fish chutney was developed using locally available ingredients followed by a series of laboratory tests, including nutrient composition, shelf-life and food safety.

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Background: Physical activity (PA) and weight management are critical for cardiovascular disease (CVD) secondary prevention. However, PA adherence during or after cardiac rehabilitation is low. Here, we assess the feasibility and acceptability of the Australian football-themed Aussie Fans in Training (Aussie-FIT) program and associated trial procedures when adapted for men with CVD.

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Article Synopsis
  • A study was conducted to evaluate the accuracy of four technology-assisted dietary assessment methods in estimating energy and nutrient intake during controlled meals across breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
  • 152 participants completed a 24-hour dietary recall after consuming meals with weights recorded, comparing results from different assessment tools, including ASA24 and Intake24.
  • Findings showed that Intake24, ASA24, and mFR-TA produced more accurate energy estimates than IA-24HR, which had a significant margin of error, indicating variability in the reliability of these assessment methods.
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In 2014, a fire at an open cut coalmine in regional Victoria, Australia burned for 6 weeks. Residents of the nearby town of Morwell were exposed to smoke, which included high levels of fine particulate matter (PM). We investigated whether the long-term effects of PM on respiratory health were moderated by diet quality.

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Background: Social media has the potential to be of great value in understanding patterns in public health using large-scale analysis approaches (eg, data science and natural language processing [NLP]), 2 of which have been used in public health: sentiment analysis and topic modeling; however, their use in the area of food security and public health nutrition is limited.

Objective: This study aims to explore the potential use of NLP tools to gather insights from real-world social media data on the public health issue of food security.

Methods: A search strategy for obtaining tweets was developed using food security terms.

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This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the relationship between self-perceived food literacy (SPFL) and quality of overall diet and main meals in Japanese adults. In total, 5998 adults aged 20-79 years were included in this analysis. The SPFL was assessed using the Japanese version of the 29-item Dutch SPFL scale (score range 1-5).

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Background: The advent of the internet has changed the landscape of available nutrition information. However, little is known about people's information-seeking behavior toward healthy eating and its potential consequences.

Objective: We aimed to examine the prevalence and correlates of nutrition information seeking from various web-based and offline media sources.

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Background: The increased availability of content of uncertain integrity obtained through the internet is a major concern. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive scrutiny of the fitness-for-purpose of web-based content on diet and nutrition.

Objective: This cross-sectional study aims to describe diet- and nutrition-related web-based content written in Japanese, identified via a systematic extraction strategy using Google Trends and Google Search.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigated whether exposure to PM from the 2014 Hazelwood coalmine fire in Australia increased long-term vulnerability to COVID-19 and severe disease among residents.
  • - Data from 612 participants revealed that around 44% had experienced COVID-19, with odds increasing by 4% to 30% for every 10 μg/m increase in PM exposure, though significant results were found in only 2 out of 18 models.
  • - The overall conclusions are uncertain regarding the impact of the coalmine fire PM on COVID-19 risk, suggesting that it may be considered a long-term risk factor until more conclusive research is available.
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One-third of the food produced globally is lost or wasted, and one cause is consumer leftovers. Re-licious was an eight-week pilot intervention aiming to increase awareness of food waste and healthy eating by building adolescents' ability to prepare and cook leftovers. Re-licious used a co-design approach and was piloted in a secondary school, half of which was during a COVID-19 lockdown period.

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Social media data are rapidly evolving and accessible, which presents opportunities for research. Data science techniques, such as sentiment or emotion analysis which analyse textual emotion, provide an opportunity to gather insight from social media. This paper describes a systematic scoping review of interdisciplinary evidence to explore how sentiment or emotion analysis methods alongside other data science methods have been used to examine nutrition, food and cooking social media content.

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Introduction: Digital technology-based interventions have gained popularity over the last two decades, due to the ease with which they are scalable and low in implementation cost. Multicomponent health promotion programmes, with significant digital components, are increasingly being deployed in the workplace to assess and promote employees' health behaviours and reduce risk of chronic diseases. However, little is known about workplace digital health interventions in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs).

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Objective: Web-based dietary interventions could support healthy eating. The Advice, Ideas and Motivation for My Eating (Aim4Me) trial investigated the impact of three levels of personalised web-based dietary feedback on diet quality in young adults. Secondary aims were to investigate participant retention, engagement and satisfaction.

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Article Synopsis
  • This research investigates the challenges faced by individuals when using two different self-administered 24-hour dietary recall programs (INTAKE24© and ASA24®) among university students.
  • It finds that participants encountered fewer perceived problems using INTAKE24© compared to ASA24®, with a significant preference towards INTAKE24© (68% of students).
  • The study also highlights that habitual eating and usability of the system significantly influenced the perceived difficulties in using INTAKE24©, but not for ASA24®.
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Aims: This study aimed to explore experiences of employability and employment for graduates of a three-year nutrition science degree.

Methods: Qualitative narrative interviews were conducted with a maximum variation sample of 22 nutrition science graduates from one large university in Australia. All graduates (n = 126) from the initiation of the degree in 2015 to current 2021 graduates were eligible for inclusion if they had not gone on to study dietetics.

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Communication with young adults about healthy lifestyle behaviours needs to result in improvements in dietary choices to impact the prevalence of diet-related diseases. This paper presents the health beliefs, behaviours, and communication practices in young Australian adults (n = 2019) by their pre-defined psycho-behavioural characteristics: Lifestyle Mavens, Health-Conscious, Aspirational Healthy Eaters, Balanced-All Rounders, Contemplating Another Day, or Blissfully Unconcerned. The Lifestyle Mavens and Health-Conscious groups were more likely to actively seek out health information on social media (p < 0.

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Objective: To investigate associations between eating behavior constructs (social eating, perceived competence, habit automaticity, self-determined motivation) and diet quality among young adults.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis.

Participants: Young adults (n = 1,005; mean age, 21.

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Background And Aims: A better understanding of the relationship between cardiovascular disease risk factors and quality of life (QoL) in older age is needed to inform development of risk reduction strategies. This cross-sectional study investigated the association of QoL with health-related behaviours in older adults at risk of heart failure.

Methods And Results: Older adults (N = 328) at risk of heart failure residing in Melbourne, Australia, provided data on QoL and health-related behaviours including physical activity, diet, smoking and alcohol consumption.

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A tacit understanding of the influence of healthy eating on chronic disease risk and quality of life among older adults is essential for successful design and roll-out of healthy ageing policies. Existing research on dietary determinants among older adults is largely outdated owing to the changing geopolitical scenarios including advancements in health and technology and global migration. Studies published between 2000 and 2020 that explored determinants of diet in older adults were identified using five databases, following Preferred Reporting of Systematic review and Meta-Analyses extended for Scoping Review (PRISMA ScR) guidelines.

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This study aimed to describe the prevalence, severity and socio-demographic predictors of food insecurity in Australian households during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, from the perspective of women. A cross-sectional online survey of Australian (18-50 years) women was conducted. The survey collected demographic information and utilised the 18-item US Department of Agriculture Household Food Security Survey Module and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10).

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Background: The assessment of dietary intake underpins population nutrition surveillance and nutritional epidemiology and is essential to inform effective public health policies and programs. Technological advances in dietary assessment that use images and automated methods have the potential to improve accuracy, respondent burden, and cost; however, they need to be evaluated to inform large-scale use.

Objective: The aim of this study is to compare the accuracy, acceptability, and cost-effectiveness of 3 technology-assisted 24-hour dietary recall (24HR) methods relative to observed intake across 3 meals.

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Young adults are a key target age group for lifestyle behaviour change as adoption of healthier behaviours has the potential to impact long term health. This paper arises from a multi-disciplinary research project, Communicating Health, which aims to bridge the gap between nutritionists, media, and social marketing professionals to produce the tools that may be used to improve engagement with young adults and reduce the prevalence of obesity. The aim of this paper is to provide nuanced details of the psycho-behavioral characteristics of each of these Living and Eating for Health Segments (LEHS).

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