Genetic Risk, Parental Feeding Practices, and Appetitive Traits in Early Life

Summary

The preschool years (2-5 years of age) is a critical timeframe to shape the lifetime risk of obesity. While the causes of obesity are complex, appetitive traits related to overeating, such as high food approach and low food avoidance, are robustly associated with a greater BMI among children. Some children are genetically pre-disposed to expressing obesogenic appetitive traits, and those traits may mediate a genetic risk for obesity. Separately, parental feeding practices are emerging as an important, yet modifiable, influence on children's obesity risk. Coercive control feeding practices, such as strictly limiting a child's intake of highly palatable foods (restriction) and using food to control children's negative emotions (emotional feeding), are believed to be detrimental for young children because they impede self-regulatory skills around eating and may increase the saliency of highly palatable foods. The goal for this project is to disentangle the inter-relationships between coercive control feeding practices, children's obesogenic appetitive traits, and children's dietary intake across the preschool years to understand how coercive control feeding practices ultimately impact children's adiposity gain over time. Importantly, the investigators aim to understand how those effects differ based on children's underlying genetic risk for obesity. The investigators hypothesize that parents will respond to children's obesogenic appetitive traits by exhibiting more coercive control feeding practices (restriction, emotional feeding), which in turn, will promote future increase in obesogenic appetitive traits and overconsumption, leading to excess adiposity gain among children. Importantly, the investigators hypothesize children with a high genetic risk for obesity will be most susceptible to the negative effects of coercive control feeding practices because food is highly salient for them. The investigators will test the hypotheses among a cohort of children aged 2.5 years old using a longitudinal study design with repeated assessments every 6 months until children are 5 years old. If successful, study findings may be leveraged to develop tailored strategies to help parents support healthy eating behaviors among their young children that consider the heterogeneity in obesogenic appetitive traits among young children due to genetic risk factors.

Conditions

• Childhood Obesity

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Attentional bias to food cues

Measurement of the amount of attention given to food cues

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

  collaborator OTHER

• National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)

  collaborator NIH

• Dartmouth College

  collaborator OTHER

• Trustees of Dartmouth College

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Jennifer Emond, PhD · Dartmouth College

• Diane Gilbert-Diamond, ScD · Dartmouth College

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age

27 Months

Max Age

72 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2024-07-18

Primary Completion

2028-08-31

Completion

2029-08-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations