An online qualitative study exploring wants and needs for a cooking programme during pregnancy in the UK and Ireland.

BACKGROUND: Optimal maternal nutrition is associated with better pregnancy and infant outcomes. Culinary nutrition programmes have potential to improve diet quality during pregnancy. Therefore, this research aimed to understand the experiences of cooking and the wants and needs of pregnant women regarding a cooking and food skills programme in the United Kingdom (UK) and Republic of Ireland (ROI). METHODS: Online focus group discussions with pregnant women and those who had experienced a pregnancy in the UK or ROI were conducted between February and April 2022. Two researchers conducted a thematic analysis. Seven focus groups with ROI participants (n = 24) and six with UK participants (n = 28) were completed. RESULTS: Five themes were generated. These were (1) cooking during pregnancy: barriers, motivators and solutions; (2) food safety, stress and guilt; (3) need for cooking and food skills programmes and desired content; (4) programme structure; (5) barriers and facilitators to programme participation. Overall, there was support for a programme focusing on broad food skills, including planning, food storage, using leftovers and to manage pregnancy-specific physiological symptoms such as food aversions. Participants emphasised the importance of inclusivity for a diverse range of people and lifestyles for programme design and content. CONCLUSIONS: Current findings support the use of digital technologies for culinary nutrition interventions, potentially combined with in-person sessions using a hybrid structure to enable the development of a support network.

Preserved conceptual priming in Alzheimer's disease.

We assessed Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy older adult control (HC) group performance on: (1) a conceptual priming task, in which participants had to make a semantic decision as to whether a degraded picture of an object encountered previously belonged to the category of living or non-living things; and (2) a recognition memory task. The AD group showed a dissociation between impaired performance on the recognition task and preserved priming for semantic decisions to degraded pictures. We argue that it is not whether priming is conceptual or perceptual that is important for the observation of priming in AD, rather it is the nature of the response that is required (c.f., Gabrieli et al., 1999).