Calcium Nutrition Perceptions among Food Bank Users: A Canadian Case Study.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Poverty and low-income prevents many Canadians from attaining a reasonable quality of life (1) and these are well recognized as important determinants of health around the world. (2-4) In addition, low-income is known to compromise the ability of individuals to meet their basic needs of life such as food. (15) In order to help economically marginalized population meet the basic food needs, several governmental and nongovernmental organizations and programs offer emergency and short-term assistance such as food hampers provided by food banks. According to HungerCount 2009, released by the Canadian Association of Food Banks, close to eight million Canadians turned to food banks for emergency food assistance in March 2009. (5) This represents an 18% increase from the same time in 2008. In addition, the majority of food bank users and those who experience poverty are women and working poor who are unable to make ends meet. (5) The increase in those accessing food banks with the higher proportion of women and the working poor highlights the growing food insecurity in Canada and warrants further research examining the needs of the low-income populations. Specifically, given the large numbers of people are turning to community-run food assistance for their meals, it is important to examine the nutritional quality and adequacy of the food provisions. (6-10) The food that is supplied to individuals by the food bank is subject to supply constraints.11 The majority of these food banks are limited to what is donated by the community and local businesses, since few food banks have the financial resources to supplement their donations with purchased food. (5) The donations to food banks mostly include non-perishable food products such as canned fruits and vegetables, pasta and other food products which are often low in calcium. However, recently, food banks are beginning to provide fluid milk to its clientele as a way of providing calcium rich food, albeit contingent on the availability of donor dollars, and realizing the importance of calcium for health and wellbeing of the vulnerable population especially women, who are the primary food bank clientele. (5,11) While the provision of milk is promising, the average availability of calcium and dairy products in food hampers remains less than the Canadian requirements. (12,13) Furthermore, there are limits to how often one may access the food bank; once every three weeks or once a month are common limitations. (5) The quantity of groceries supplied to the individual as well as the quality of food donated to the food bank are inconsistent that change with the season and economic climate. (5) This volatility in food provision and food insecurity observe in low-income earners result in wide variation in the composition of food hampers distributed, (14) 99% of these food hampers do not provide sufficient amount of nutrients per person, (12) and compromised health status. (15-19) Specifically, calcium continues to remain a nutrient of concern for low-income populations and underserved individuals. (6,7,14,20) Calcium carries out many important physiological roles in the body; it facilitates muscle contraction and relaxation, nerve transmission, bone formation and homeostasis, enzyme activation, and blood coagulation. (21-24) Research has repeatedly shown that the calcium status of low-income persons and food bank clients is influenced by numerous factors. (14,19,25) In addition to the financial constraints, health psychology literature suggests that the adoption of any health behavior is influenced by many psychosocial factors. As a result, many theories of behavioral change have been constructed in an effort to explain human health-related behaviors, to determine targets for change, and the best methods for implementing these changes. (26) In many of the theoretical models including the health belief model, which is one of the most widely used conceptual frameworks in health behavior, individual's perceptions, including their judgment of the benefits and barriers associated with health behaviors, are fundamental to behavioral change. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".