Regional health and welfare planning based on Health Japan 21 recommendations is increasing in cities, towns and villages. We have created worksheets to aid this planning with the support of local health center dietitians. These worksheets are based on the recommendations Health Japan 21 for preventing circulatory disease and diabetes, and for producing a health-promotion questionnaire. The Health Japan 21 and Healthy Parent and Child 21 programs apply the concept of health promotion. These worksheets have been designed to apply this concept to help produce a suitable regional plan that gives due importance to the nutritional status. This can be expected to recognize the value of dietitians in cities, towns and villages.

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A questionnaire survey was conducted among 1, 298 parents (mostly mothers) living predominantly in one town of Fukui prefecture in order to examine their dietary awareness and their children's dietary behavior and health condition. The subjects were divided into four groups according the age of the children: infants (n=364), preschool children (n=333), elementary school children (n=180) and junior high school children (n=421). The developmental characteristics and relationship between the parents' dietary awareness and the children's dietary behavior and health condition were investigated.
There were significant differences in the parents' dietary consciousness among the four groups in respect of “awareness of dietary management” and “dietary attitude”. There were also significant differences in the children's dietary behavior among the four groups in respect of “kinds of food” and “skipped meals”.
The total score for “awareness of dietary management” by the parents was positively correlated with the children's dietary behavior (except for obese children). This total score was negatively affected by such factors as “unbalanced diet”, “orientation toward ready-to-serve dishes”, “skipped meals” and “insufficiency of enjoying meals with the family”.
The “awareness of dietary management” by the parents was positively correlated with the “frequency of ready-to-serve dishes”. Those parents thinking that they do not have enough time to prepare mealstended to use ready-to-serve dishes.

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A method for objectively classifying dishes into staple food, main dish, side dish, small dish, soup, dessert, drink, and sake in respect of the nutritional value and the ingestion purpose is presented. A suitable and simple nutrition guidance method was devised by defining the name of the dishes on the menu and their units in the dish classification tables, and then illustrating the dietary intake by explaining how to eat from a combination of dishes. The index and standard for classification were made concise and easily understandable to ensure general applicability to the measure of caloric intake.
An analysis was made of 4, 238 meals of 842 days of dietary records from 71 middle-age housewives to confirm that the dish classification method was useful for evaluating the dietary intake at the group level, and that the dish classification standard was appropriate.

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To clarify the change in intestinal microflora under a microgravity environment, we chose 12 health young men (22.2±3.2 years old) for a 20-day bed-rest experiment. After a 4-day adjustment period, the subjects were put to bed in a head-down position at an angle of 6°. The basic food intake was provided by a menu cycle of 4 days to maintain the body weight which contained 1, 931kcal of energy, 67g of protein (14% PE), 53g of fat (24% FE) and 291g of carbohydrate (62% CE).A comparison between the data for the experimental period of two weeks and the adjustment period shows that the number of Lactobacilli decreased by a significant level (p<0.05) and the number of Clostridium perfringens increased by a significant level (p<0.05) in the feces, while no change was apparent for the other bacteria.The results also demonstrate that, among the putrefactive substances (phenol, p-cresol, ethyl-phenol, indole and skatole) in the feces, p-cresol increased by a significant level (p<0.05) and phenol tended to decrease. A evaluation of the mental status by the Zung self-rating depression scale (SDS) indicated the onset of depression during the test period due to the lack of activity.These results suggest that the deterioration of the intestinal environment from the change in intestinal bacteria and the increase in putrefactive substances was caused by long-term stress induced by 20 days of bed rest under the microgravity environment.

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The effects of menu preparation, nutritional guidance and nutritional surveillance on nutritional intake are evaluated. The nutritional elements remaining in 255 foods after cooking were assessed by using the Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan (Fifth Revised Edition).
The loss innutritional elements by cooking could be effectively assessed by using this table. An increase in the nutritional elements originating from the seasoning used in cooking was recognized to originate from nukamiso-zuke, salt pickles, boiling with salt, and cooking with oil. Nitrate was decreased about 30% by cooking.
The results of this study confirm that this table can be used as a standard for determining the element loss in Japanese food from cooking for subsequent nutritional guidance.

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