Diet quality is a broad term that encapsulates both perceived and actual practices, personal preferences and cultural diversity. Measuring dietary quality can be problematic and includes investigating food types, the number or size of portions or their frequency. Diet quality may also be related to the type of food being ingested, snacking and other eating habits. Manufactured beverages and fast food may also be included as well as microbiological quality and attempts to improve single food items such as meats or vegetables. In this book, Diet Quality: An Evidence-Based Approach, Volume 2 all of the major facets of diet quality in relation to health outcomes are covered. This important new text includes methods for determining diet quality while adopting a holistic approach to impart information on the major areas of concern or knowledge. Chapters link in measurable indices of health such as obesity, pregnancy outcomes, cancer and cancer outcomes, and mortality. This book represents a diverse set of subject matters and seeks to fill a gap in the literature at a time when there is an increasing awareness that well being is associated with the qualitative nature of diets. Contributors are authors of international and national standing and emerging fields of science are incorporated. Diet Quality: An Evidence-Based Approach, Volume 2 is a useful new text designed for nutritionists, dietitians, clinicians, epidemiologist, policy makers and health care professionals of various disciplines.

This book explores the intersection of food and foodways from global and local perspectives. The collection contributes to interdisciplinary debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The expert contributions collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. They explore a wide variety of topics, including curry, bread, sugar, coffee, milk, pulque, Virginia ham, fast-food, obesity, and US ethnic restaurants. Local Foods Meet Global Foodways considers movements in context, and, in doing so, complicates the notions that food 'shapes' culture as it crosses borders or that culture 'adapts' foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By analysing the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific cultures of consumption they provoke, these case studies reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local, to be a dynamic, co-creative development jointly facilitated by humans and nature. This volume explores a vast expanse of global regions, such as North and Central America, Europe, China, East Asia and the Pacific, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the USSR/Russia. It includes a foreword by the eminent food scholar Carole Counihan, and an afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan, and will be of great interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and American studies. This book is based on a special issue of Food and Foodways.

Milk is the only food mammals produce naturally to feed their offspring. The human species is the only one that takes milk from other animals and consumes it beyond weaning age. Cultures of Milk contrasts the practices of the world’s two leading milk producers, India and the United States. In both countries, milk is considered to have special qualities. Drawing on ethnographic and scientific studies, popular media, and government reports, Andrea Wiley reveals that the cultural significance of milk goes well beyond its nutritive value. Shifting socioeconomic and political factors influence how people perceive the importance of milk and how much they consume. In India, where milk is out of reach for many, consumption is rising rapidly among the urban middle class. But milk drinking is declining in America, despite the strength of the dairy industry. Milk is bound up in discussions of food scarcity in India and food abundance in the United States. Promotion of milk as a means to enhance child growth boosted consumption in twentieth-century America and is currently doing the same in India, where average height is low. Wiley considers how variation among populations in the ability to digest lactose and ideas about how milk affects digestion influence the type of milk and milk products consumed. In India, most milk comes from buffalo, but cows have sacred status for Hindus. In the United States, cow’s milk has long been a privileged food, but is now facing competition from plant-based milk.