The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend a 20–35 percent daily intake of fat. Resisting the temptation to eat high-fat foods, in conjunction with stage of readiness to avoid these foods, has been shown to influence healthy behavior change. Data ( N = 6516) from three randomized controlled trials were pooled to examine the relationships among direct intervention effects on temptations and stage of change for limiting high-fat foods. Findings demonstrate separate simultaneous growth processes in which baseline level of temptations, but not the rate of change in temptations, was significantly related to the change in readiness to avoid high-fat foods.

The performance of several models under different conditions of zero-inflation and dispersion are evaluated. Results from simulated and real data showed that the zero-altered or zero-inflated negative binomial model were preferred over others (e.g., ordinary least-squares regression with log-transformed outcome, Poisson model) when data have excessive zeros and over-dispersion.