Search Results

Part I of this chapter describes some of the activities that some food and beverage corporations routinely engage in as part of their ‘health and wellness’ strategies. Specific changes in food industry policies can favourably impact dietary practices and nutritional status, and therefore contribute to reductions in the risk of cardiovascular disease and chronic disease in both the medium and long term. These changes focus on product reformulation and the promotion of physical activity and healthy lifestyles. A case study of PepsiCo's 2010 goals and commitments is presented. Part II evaluates the food industry's tactics and potentially adverse effects on public health. Lessons from the tobacco and other industries are applied to the food industry, using material drawn from PepsiCo's proposals. The analysis suggests that food companies may be replicating several of the tactics used by tobacco companies to promote a positive image and influence research as part of an effort to reduce the prospects for public regulation and taxation.

With sports now being cast as a solution to a range of social, economic, health and urban-related ills, this chapter explores the role played by mass participation running events (MPREs) in achieving these aims and fostering, in the process, a lucratively sensible city. MPREs blend commercial means with the ends of mass participation to achieve a unique mix of profit and healthy lifestyle promotion. After detailing the nature and characteristics of MPREs, the discussion turns to the example of Austin's proliferation of events and Newcastle's major event — the Great North Run — in order to examine the discrepancies between the rhetoric and reality of MPRE participation in these two very different cities.

This chapter discusses how different purchasers have endeavored to hold down health-related expenses while purchasing health care access for their beneficiaries. It presents a case vignette about a company that has made a very extensive investment in improving health care access and interventional strategies against illness for its workforce. This company has drawn on myriad ideas, tools, and philosophies and contracted with several partners to implement this approach. The possible cost-savings benefits from healthier lifestyles and lower morbidity have not yet been fully realized, which is what makes this example compelling, especially regarding the expectations of all the stakeholders involved. We have an opportunity to witness whether a well-planned endeavor targeting employee health will bring the benefits that are hoped for.

This chapter considers modern school restructuring and reform. It gives some examples of programs aimed at high-risk students and looks at growing experiences with school restructuring designs. An important outcome for effective schools is the promotion of healthy lifestyles and the prevention of high-risk behaviors. Children who are engaged in school activities are much less likely to get into trouble with drugs, sex, and violence. Some programs aimed at high-risk students include Valued Youth Partnership, Cities-in-Schools (CIS), The School Transition Environment Project (STEP), The Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP), Liberty Partnerships, and Parents as Teachers (PAT).

This chapter focuses on the long-running television show Beat It!—a creation of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, and reported to be the first television show produced by the HIV-positive community for wide dissemination. It describes the discursive strategies used by Beat It!, with particular emphasis on the show’s role in the 2000–2002 activist campaign for prevention of mother-to-child transmission treatment programs. It demonstrates how Beat It! harnessed television’s ability to demystify complex issues relating to HIV and how, under the rubric of “positive living,” it presented the many ways in which HIV-positive people could maintain a healthy lifestyle. Beat It! captures and conveys the most significant developments relating to HIV in South Africa between 1999 and 2006—during which the show’s first six series were broadcast. The program’s mirroring of the political campaigns of HIV activist organizations provides an important record of the contemporary history of HIV politics during this time.

This chapter documents how individuals and couples are improvising, responding to the challenges, risks, and opportunities of life today, and in so doing helping to define the contours of an evolving twenty-first-century life course. It also charts the unevenness of this evolving paradigm of a more voluntarily customized life course. What many want, but can’t always find, are chances to reset the time clocks of their lives, often in the form of different combinations of flexible, frequently less-than-full-time work, volunteering, learning, caring, and leisure, including more healthy lifestyles. Despite the absence of institutionalized options for such configurations, growing numbers of Boomers are indeed time shifting, resetting their lives and their identities, making them up as they go. Others are less fortunate. Boomers are following four pathways through encore adulthood: neotraditional time shifting, time shifting for the long game, portfolio time shifting, and unanticipated time shifting.

Technology is changing healthcare and our understanding of human behavior. To date, most of our theories about behavior, everyday activities, and cognitive health have been formed based on questionnaire data, laboratory tests and experiments, and placing observers within the environment to record human behavioral habits. Smart technologies offer an opportunity to passively collect data about human behavior within the everyday environment. The possibilities for using smart technologies that can adapt, sense, infer, learn, anticipate, and intervene for health monitoring and intervention are considered “extraordinary” (Department of Health, 2007). Our Smart Home group affiliated with the Center for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems (CASAS) and others have been studying the role of smart environments as a type of “cognitive prosthesis” in which the smart environment operates alongside humans in order to monitor, maintain, and enhance their health and functional capabilities and overcome their limitations. For the clinical neuropsychologist, smart environment technologies offer opportunities for new methods of data collection, for both clinical and research purposes. Over the past decade, people perform their normal activities of daily living. The data can then be used to support everyday activities and to assist in rehabilitation and proactive interventions through real-time assistance and monitoring of real-world responses to intervention. The data can also be used to improve our understanding of the effects of cognitive impairment on everyday functioning as well as theories about behavior. The chapter begins with a discussion of research in the sensor technologies have become more mature. For example, sensor power and capacity have increased while sensor size and cost have decreased. Similarly, there has been significant progress in the areas of wireless networks, data processing, and machine learning. Data can now be automatically collected from sensor-filled smart homes (environmental or fixed devices), activity trackers (wearable devices), and smartphones (portable devices) in an unobtrusive manner while area of activity recognition, followed by application of this work to functional and health assessment and to activity-aware intervention.