Marisol Perez - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotional eating has been identified as an unhealthy behavior and risk factor for overweight status among children, adolescents and adults. Emotional eating - tendency to eat when not hungry to cope with stress or negative emotion - leads to overweight status through the increased consumption of high energy dense foods over time. Cross-cultural differences have been found in the prevalence of emotional eating, with Hispanics reporting higher frequencies of emotional eating than Caucasians. Very little is known about what predisposes children to emotionally eat, but the developmental literature can elucidate potential child characteristics that predispose children to emotionally eat. The proposed study explores the relationship between negative affectivity and effortful control (two constructs that have been found to predict children's psychosocial, behavioral and academic outcomes) to emotional eating and a child's weight status. The central hypothesis for the proposed research is that children who exhibit high levels of negative affectivity and/or low levels of effortful control may be more likely to emotionally eat which could put them at risk future weight gain beyond what is developmentally appropriate. The sample will consist of 200 children between the ages of 4 to 6 years old, of which 100 will be Hispanic and 100 will be Caucasian. Children will be given a standard FDA approved snack before being asked to complete an Effortful Control Battery, followed by a mildly stressing task. Stress responses will be measured via respiration and heart rate. After the stress induction, children will partake in an eating laboratory task designed to measure emotional eating. While the children are completing the tasks their primary caregiver will complete several questionnaires related to the child's temperamental negative affectivity, effortful control, child eating behaviors, child physical activity levels, parental feeding strategies, and food-related household security. This research is innovative because it combined the developmental, emotional eating, and obesity literature to create a hypothesized model of emotional eating that can predispose children to become overweight. It goes beyond identifying risk factors for emotional eating and addresses why there are cross-cultural differences in emotional eating and prevalence of children overweight. In addition, it furthers the developmental literature by establishing measurement equivalence on measures of effortful control and temperamental negative affectivity and exploring cross-cultural differences on these measures. If our hypotheses are confirmed, empirically validated interventions for children exist to increase emotion regulation and inhibitory control which may be important interventions to include in obesity prevention programs. The cross-cultural differences that emerge may also inform adaptations to obesity prevention programs for Hispanic children. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This proposal is attempting to identify a specific group of children at risk for becoming overweight, or for those already overweight for becoming obese, through child temperamental factors. If our hypotheses are confirmed, empirically validated interventions for children exist to increase emotion regulation and inhibitory control which may be important interventions to include in obesity prevention programs. The cross-cultural differences that emerge may also inform adaptations to obesity prevention programs for Hispanic children.

Project Summary Although childhood obesity is a national health problem reaching epidemic proportions, Hispanic children are nearly twice as likely as non-Hispanic white children to be obese, and Mexican Americans have higher risk of obesity than other Hispanic subgroups. Weight-associated health problems are also increasing at alarming rates. If contemporary obesity prevalence rates persist, ?the current generation of children will be the first generation in US history to be sicker and die earlier than their parents? (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2012). Because the challenges of intervention are multiplied after a child has already reached obesity status, it is imperative to understand the processes of developing risk in the earliest years of life. The identification of risk and resiliency predictors of the development of obesity during critical formative years of childhood will provide specific targets amenable to preventive public health interventions. We propose to capitalize on longitudinal data collected by an NIMH and NICHD-funded study of very low income Mexican American mothers and infants (Las Madres Nuevas) that assesses a multitude of cultural and environmental risk and protective factors from the prenatal period through six years of age. We propose to leverage this existing longitudinal dataset, and collect physical health and markers of cardiometabolic risk at ages 7.5 and 9. In combination, we will: 1) Use advanced statistical procedures to chart trajectories of weight gain using objective measures of weight and growth measured at 13 time points from birth through age 9; 2) Identify critical periods from birth to age 9 at which children diverge from healthy weight gain trajectories; 3) Evaluate early life biological susceptibility as a moderator of the impact of environmental influences on child weight gain trajectories and obesity; 4) Evaluate the consequences of cultural, economic, maternal and child factors, and weight gain trajectories for emerging physical health and cardiometabolic risk. The proposed longitudinal study, with data drawn from biological measures, anthropometric measures, parent report, medical records, and observational sessions, is ideally situated to answer key questions related to weight disparities among low- income MA children, and delineate mechanistic pathways in the emergence of MA child obesity. Our scientific approach emphasizes the cultural embeddedness of obesity development, with the view that the reduction of child obesity disparities can best be accomplished by understanding sociocultural and economic forces that shape eating behavior and weight gain. This project holds great potential to address central questions about early life contributors to weight gain and obesity risk in a high risk ethnic group, and enhance opportunities for prevention of obesity and associated health problems.