Heidi Reis

Many US body donation programs impose restrictions on donations based on body size. To examine the body habitus criteria related to body weight, height, proportion, and other size factors in United States body donation programs (USBDP), 127 USBDP publicly available websites listed by the University of Florida were reviewed. Since this study focuses on publicly available website information, it may not capture the characteristics of all programs. Eleven percent of the USBDP websites with public‐facing criteria exclusively listed numeric restrictions, while 24.4% included both descriptive and quantitative (numeric) terminology. The majority of websites with public‐facing criteria (90.6%) imposed a weight‐related restriction, with 55.1% providing descriptive (i.e., non‐numeric) terms. The most common body mass index (BMI) cutoff (30 kg/m ² ) could disqualify some U.S. adults from donating, as the average BMI in the United States for adult females is 29.8 and for adult males is 29.4. Fourteen programs offered explanations of their descriptive or numeric weight/BMI restrictions. As language evolves to better describe and reflect body habitus, keeping up to date with best practice and community preferences may help when designing donor criteria. Public‐facing information about body habitus criteria for donation may limit the representativeness of body habitus used in anatomical education and research. The implications of this on anatomical education and weight bias in students require more research.

Medical schools rely on body donation programs to obtain cadavers for teaching anatomy and conducting scientific research. However, many body donation programs utilize strict criteria for donation, including height, amputee status, body weight, or body mass index (BMI). BMI criteria limit medical students’ the familiarity and positive interactions with larger bodies, possibly decreasing the future quality of care provided by these students to high weight individuals and increasing weight stigma. This study assessed online criteria for 128 body donation programs in the United States, focusing on weight and BMI. Most (90.6%) of body donation program websites had weight-based restrictions, using either qualitative terms (79.7%, obese, proportional), quantitative measures (35.9%, BMI, weight), or both (25%). Only 9% provided justifications for weight limitations. In addition, no programs had DEI statements. The most used BMI cutoff (30 kg/m2) eliminates half of potential US body donors, since the average BMI for adults is 29.8 for females and 29.4 for males. This research demonstrates a key area for improvements in medical school weight bias. Increasing weight equity in body donation programs can be the first step in reducing medical weight bias and providing a broader and more realistic medical education with respect to body size.

Background: Policy initiatives have provided funding for non-acute nutrition interventions to address food insecurity as a social determinant of health, but more research is needed to understand the outcomes of these initiatives in order to determine the areas of highest impact. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the outcomes that were assessed in three nutrition interventions (produce prescription programs, medically tailored meals, and community supported agriculture) that aim to address food insecurity as a social determinant of health, and this was undertaken in order to identify future areas of study that can heighten impact. Methods: This systematic review was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) criteria. A list of search terms and keywords were compiled by the research team. A Boolean search was conducted from 1 January 2000 to 1 January 2023 in the PubMed advanced search database. Results: A total of 1015 articles were initially pulled from the PubMed database, and, after a screening process, 21 articles were included in our review. Nineteen of the articles focused on adult populations or families and two focused on children. The main outcomes assessed were changes in self-reported dietary intake, while a few of the articles addressed feasibility and cost-related outcomes. Conclusions: More research is needed to assess whether nutritional interventions to address food insecurity as a social determinant of health are feasible and more cost effective in the long term. Additionally, more work should be conducted in pediatric populations, which could have a robust return on investment in terms of both healthcare utilization and healthcare expenditure.

This article describes how a group of students and an instructor at an MLIS program developed a community of practice (CoP) around critical librarianship. We provide a literature review on CoPs and relate this to our own experience with the reading group. We include our individual narratives that reveal the similarities and differences in our experiences as students and practitioners. The Critical Librarianship Reading Group provided a community for peers, knowledge building around critical librarianship, and an opportunity to hear from a number of voices through the readings and the members of the group. We hope this inspires other MLIS programs to develop their own CoPs that connect students, instructors, and alumni/practitioners

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is an open-source algorithm that allows for easier searching in search engines as it looks for natural language combinations in Google. The same algorithm could be applied to free database resources and commercial databases to make searching easier for users. This article examines the possibilities of BERT in resources other than Google. Many of our users come to database searching using Google type searches only to find controlled vocabulary is the way in which many databases are structured. If BERT is incorporated into popular databases along with controlled vocabulary, searching for information and finding it would be much easier for novice and advanced users, though careful consideration should be given to the search bias the algorithm may induce.