Research Expertise and Interest
nutrition, obesity, Food Insecurity, Perinatal Health, diabetes
Research Description
Dr. Barbara Laraia is a Professor of Public Health Nutrition in the Division of Community Health Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She oversees several projects that investigate how human response to stress influences eating behaviors, metabolic processes and aging biomarkers. A primary focus of her research is the impact of food insecurity, viewed as a double burden of severe stress and poor dietary intake, on maternal and child health outcomes. She has used her expertise to design and conduct survey research that combines questionnaires, dietary assessment, clinical anthropometric measurement, collection of biomarkers, and direct observation of neighborhood attributes. She has implemented a mindfulness stress reduction and healthy eating interventions for middle- and low-income overweight/obese pregnant women that found decrease stress and depression and improved glycemic control. She is the Principal Investor for the NHLBI Growth and Health longitudinal cohort study of cardiovascular risk factors and accelerated aging among women and their children. In these large projects, she assesses household food security status as an important contextual factor that directly impedes access to nutritious foods as well as indirectly disrupts metabolism and aging marker through stress and dysregulated eating behaviors. Each of these research projects are transdisciplinary, bringing together colleagues from nutrition, health psychology, neuroscience, social epidemiology and biostatistics to identify new ways of analyzing and addressing the observed health disparities. She has written over 150 publications on early life adversity, stress and non-homeostatic eating behaviors, and how these exposures shape dietary intake and influence metabolic dysregulation. Her research strives to identify implications to inform innovative programs and policies.
