Food Marketing Resilience Study (Project REACH)

There is strong empirical evidence that food marketing promotes excess energy intake leading to obesity. Yet not all children are susceptible to the effects of food marketing and these differences and variability between individuals are poorly understood. Identifying these sources of variability will elucidate characteristics of children who are more susceptible to food-cue induced overconsumption and may highlight novel sources of resiliency to overconsumption from environmental food cues. The proposed research will follow healthy weight children who vary by familial risk for obesity to identify neural and behavioral phenotypes that may protect an individual from food-cue (food advertising) induced overeating and determine whether these phenotypes are protective from weight gain during the pre-adolescent period. To test this hypothesis, we will recruit 140, 7–8-year-old healthy weight children at two levels of obesity risk (70 high-risk and 70 low-risk) based on parent weight status. In aim one, we will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize the effect of food commercials on children's subsequent neural processing of high-energy dense food cues and relate activation to familial risk for obesity. Second, we will measure the effect of exposing children to food commercials on laboratory measures of homeostatic and non-homeostatic eating (eating in the absence of hunger) and relate these behavioral responses to neural responses. Third, we will determine if prior food advertising exposure and executive functioning (inhibition, attention and working memory) moderate the relationship between food commercial exposure and brain and behavioral responses. Finally, we will conduct follow-up visits one-year after baseline with data driven analyses to identify neural, behavioral, and cognitive phenotypes that are associated with both risk and resilience for adiposity gain