Healthy Weight Research Center

The USDA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helps tens of millions of Americans afford food each month, and participation has grown during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new report identifies evidence-based opportunities that have the greatest potential to improve SNAP participants’ nutrition and overall health. Learn more: https://bit.ly/SNAP-Impact

With the rapid growth in online grocery shopping, researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (study lead and HWRC co-director, Lisa Harnack) sought to identify design features online grocery stores should consider to support the increasing number of Americans striving to eat healthy for weight loss. Their findings were recently published in the journal Public Health Nutrition.
—Read more: UMN News and Events 7/13/21, Grocery Dive Brief 7/26/21

Project EAT is a long-running study led by Professor Dianne Neumark-Sztainer (HWRC Affiliate Faculty) tracking the general health and well-being of adolescents as they age . . . UMN News and Events 6/10/2021.

Emilyn Alejadro, assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology and HWRC Affiliate Faculty, is one of eight faculty named as a new McKnight Presidential Fellow. The McKnight Presidential Fellows Program gives three-year awards to exceptional faculty who have been newly granted tenure and promotion to associate professor. The program recognizes their excellence in research and scholarship, leadership, potential to build top-tier programs, and ability to advance University of Minnesota priorities. 
—Brief 05/12/2021

A new NIH/NHLBI clinical trial entitled “Reducing Childhood Obesity Using Ecological Momentary Intervention (EMI) and Video Feedback at Family Meals,” was awarded to Jerica Berge, professor in the Department of Family Medicine & Community Health and HWRC Affiliated Faculty. The main objective of the proposed study is to utilize state-of-the-art intervention methods including ecological momentary intervention (EMI, i.e., mHealth), video feedback, and home visiting methods in partnership with community health workers (CHWs) to examine whether increasing the quality and quantity of family meals reduces childhood obesity disparities
—FMCH News & Events 5/3/2021
—The Minnesota Daily 6/21/2021

Many people have turned to comfort eating due to the loneliness imposed by numerous lockdowns and worries of contracting coronavirus and even grieving its victims. 

However, experts noted recently attributed six poor eating habits to the coronavirus pandemic. . . .

—Read more at the Science Times 4/14/21

“Health wearables, per se, are not the solution to solve obesity, being overweight, or chronic disease,” said lead author Zan Gao, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s School of Kinesiology and HWRC affiliate faculty. “They are simply tools.”
— Read more: HealthDay 3/22/2021

Jayne Fulkerson (HWRC affiliated faculty) is one of eleven faculty at the School of Nursing elected as Distinguished Fellows of the National Academies of Practice (NAP) in Nursing, the most ever in the School of Nursing’s history. The prestigious honor acknowledges their outstanding achievements and recognizes them as leaders in the profession.
—School of Nursing News & Events 3/19/2021

Zan Gao, Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology and HWRC Affiliated Faculty, said the devices were effective at motivating people by “providing constant reminders to get up and move to achieve these goals, which promotes self-monitoring and self-regulation.”
— Science 3/17/2021

. . . School of Public Health Assistant Professor Katherine Arlinghaus and Professor Melissa Laska (HWRC Affiliate Faculty and Co-director respectively) recently outlined the need for more food insecurity research that looks specifically at how it’s intertwined with parent feeding practices in a paper published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
—Read more at SPH News 2/26/21.