HOUSTON – Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital are looking for twins under 4 months old to participate in a study about preschool eating behaviors that aims to better understand childhood obesity.
Researchers at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center hope the study will help them better understand the development of preschool children's eating behaviors. They said the study is specifically geared toward twins in order to understand how heritable eating habits are and whether those habits derive from genes or environmental causes.
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"Obesity is a growing concern among Houston preschool children," Dr. Alexis Frazier-Wood, assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor and the CNRC, said in a press release. "We want to understand eating behaviors such as why some preschoolers stop eating when they are full when others do not, or why some children are excited about food and others are not. We want to see if similar eating behaviors can be observed in young infants, and if these behaviors will predict preschool eating behaviors. Since these differences in eating behaviors associate with body weight, ultimately we hope to shed light on the underlying reasons why some children have more difficulties maintaining a healthy weight than others."
Eligible participants include women over 18 who are pregnant with twins or who have twins younger than 4 months. The twins must have been born at or over 34 weeks and should be available for the study at exactly 4 months of age.
Financial compensation and parking will be provided for the study. For more information on the study, or to sign up, contact Janice Stuff at jstuff@bcm.edu or 713-798-7066.