Official websites use .gov

A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS

A lock ( 🔒 ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Need Help

Characterizing the relationships of genetic risk and parental coercive feeding practices with appetitive traits and adiposity gain across early life.

Award Number: R01DK136698
ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DIABETES & DIGESTIVE & KIDNEY DISEASES
OPDIV: NIH
AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY
AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 05/01/2024
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 02/28/2029

Group Awards By:

View Award Description

Characterizing the relationships of genetic risk and parental coercive feeding practices with appetitive traits and adiposity gain across early life. - PROJECT 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. Our 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, we aim to understand how those effects differ based on children’s underlying genetic risk for obesity. We 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, we 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. We will test our 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. We include validated assessments of parental feeding practices, child appetitive traits and usual dietary intake. We will assess children’s genetic risk for obesity via candidate single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and a polygenic risk score. Importantly, our novel approach expands upon previous research by including our lab’s proven, objective paradigm to measure children’s food approach and overconsumption. Specifically, we will use eye-tracking to measure children’s attentional bias to food, an objective metric of food approach. We also include an eating in the absence of hunger paradigm to objectively measure children’s overconsumption. Study findings can 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.


Issue Date FY	Funding FY	Legal Entity Name	Legal Entity Address	Legal Entity City	Legal Entity State	Legal Entity Zip Code	Legal Entity COUNTY	Legal Entity COUNTRY	Assistance Listing	Award Code	Budget Year	Action Date	Action Type	Action Amount

Issue Date FY: 2026 ( Subtotal = $673,972 )
2026	2026	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases Extramural Research	000	3	2/9/2026	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$673,972
														Subtotal = $673,972

Issue Date FY: 2025 ( Subtotal = $665,878 )
2025	2025	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases Extramural Research	000	2	2/28/2025	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$599,292
2025	2025	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases Extramural Research	001	2	8/4/2025	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$66,586
														Subtotal = $665,878

Issue Date FY: 2024 ( Subtotal = $651,473 )
2024	2024	TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE	7 LEBANON ST	HANOVER	NH	03755	GRAFTON	USA	Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases Extramural Research	000	1	4/15/2024	NEW	$651,473
														Subtotal = $651,473

Grand Total All Awards = $1,991,323

Top

All Categories

About

Search

Reports

Data Submission

Award Information

Characterizing the relationships of genetic risk and parental coercive feeding practices with appetitive traits and adiposity gain across early life.

Award Number: R01DK136698

ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DIABETES & DIGESTIVE & KIDNEY DISEASES

OPDIV: NIH

AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY

AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 05/01/2024

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 02/28/2029

Federal Websites

Department of Health & Human Services

HHS Operating Divisions

HHS Staff Divisions

Download A Document Viewer