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1. Effect of mobile food environments on fast food visits

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46425-2  

   García Bulle Bueno, Bernardo; Horn, Abigail L.; Bell, Brooke M.; Bahrami, Mohsen; Bozkaya, Burçin; Pentland, Alex; de la Haye, Kayla; Moro, Esteban (March 2024, Nature Communications)

   Abstract Poor diets are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Exposure to low-quality food environments saturated with fast food outlets is hypothesized to negatively impact diet. However, food environment research has predominantly focused on static food environments around home neighborhoods and generated mixed findings. In this work, we leverage population-scale mobility data in the U.S. to examine 62M people’s visits to food outlets and evaluate how food choice is influenced by the food environments people are exposed to as they move through their daily routines. We find that a 10% increase in exposure to fast food outlets in mobile environments increases individuals’ odds of visitation by 20%. Using our results, we simulate multiple policy strategies for intervening on food environments to reduce fast-food outlet visits. This analysis suggests that optimal interventions are informed by spatial, temporal, and behavioral features and could have 2x to 4x larger effect than traditional interventions focused on home food environments. 

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2. Food web complexity modulates environmental impacts on food chain length

   https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.10331  

   Shibasaki, Shota; Terui, Akira (April 2024, Oikos)

   The determinants of food chain length (FCL), a crucial aspect of biodiversity due to its effects on ecosystem functioning, have long been debated. Previous studies proposed resource availability, disturbance, and ecosystem size as environmental drivers. However, studies using stable isotope approaches have shown inconsistent results, indicating missing links between environmental drivers and FCL. Here, we hypothesized that species richness and motifs (i.e. three‐species subgraphs) modulated environmental effects on FCL. Combining empirical food webs with ourN‐species food web model, we found that FCL disproportionately changed at low species richness, with saturation at high species richness. This functional response was essential to the interdependent effects of disturbance and ecosystem size in our model. Disturbance more strongly regulated FCL in smaller ecosystems, where species richness was low. Similarly, increasing ecosystem size enhanced FCL under strong, but not weak, disturbance regimes. Our study suggests that internal food web structure should deepen our understanding of how FCL changes over environments. 

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3. The Long-Term Effect of Food Insecurity During College on Future Food Insecurity

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2021.05.038  

   Leung, Cindy W.; Insolera, Noura; Cohen, Alicia J.; Wolfson, Julia A. (December 2021, American Journal of Preventive Medicine)
4. Scientists' warning on endangered food webs

   https://doi.org/10.5194/we-20-1-2020  

   Heleno, Ruben H.; Ripple, William J.; Traveset, Anna (January 2020, Web Ecology)

   Abstract. All organisms are ultimately dependent on a large diversity of consumptiveand non-consumptive interactions established with other organisms, formingan intricate web of interdependencies. In 1992, when 1700 concernedscientists issued the first “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity”, ourunderstanding of such interaction networks was still in its infancy. Bysimultaneously considering the species (nodes) and the links that glue themtogether into functional communities, the study of modern food webs – ormore generally ecological networks – has brought us closer to a predictivecommunity ecology. Scientists have now observed, manipulated, and modelledthe assembly and the collapse of food webs under various global changestressors and identified common patterns. Most stressors, such as increasingtemperature, biological invasions, biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation,over-exploitation, have been shown to simplify food webs byconcentrating energy flow along fewer pathways, threatening long-termcommunity persistence. More worryingly, it has been shown that communitiescan abruptly change from highly diverse to simplified stable states withlittle or no warning. Altogether, evidence shows that apart from thechallenge of tackling climate change and hampering the extinction ofthreatened species, we need urgent action to tackle large-scale biologicalchange and specifically to protect food webs, as we are under the risk of pushingentire ecosystems outside their safe zones. At the same time, we need togain a better understanding of the global-scale synergies and trade-offsbetween climate change and biological change. Here we highlight the mostpressing challenges for the conservation of natural food webs and recentadvances that might help us addressing such challenges. 

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5. Brain on Food: The Neuroepigenetics of Nutrition

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuint.2021.105099  

   Vaziri, Anoumid; Dus, Monica (June 2021, Neurochemistry International)

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