Barbara Laraia

About

Dr. Barbara Laraia is a Professor of Community Health Sciences and Public Health Nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the influence of contextual level effects on dietary intake, cardiometabolic risk factors, and pregnancy outcomes, especially among vulnerable populations. She oversees projects investigating how human response to stress influences eating behaviors, metabolic processes, and aging biomarkers, with a primary emphasis on the impact of food insecurity as a double burden of severe stress and poor dietary intake on maternal and child health outcomes. Dr. Laraia has designed and conducted survey research combining questionnaires, dietary assessments, clinical anthropometric measurements, biomarker collection, and neighborhood attribute observations. She has implemented mindfulness stress reduction and healthy eating interventions for middle- and low-income overweight/obese pregnant women, which have demonstrated decreases in stress and depression and improvements in glycemic control. As the Principal Investigator for the NHLBI Growth and Health longitudinal cohort study, she assesses household food security as a key contextual factor affecting access to nutritious foods and indirectly influencing metabolism and aging through stress and eating behaviors. Her work is transdisciplinary, involving collaboration across nutrition, health psychology, neuroscience, social epidemiology, and biostatistics to address health disparities.…

Research topics

• Medicine
• Demography
• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Sociology
• Environmental health
• Clinical psychology
• Social psychology
• Obstetrics
• Pediatrics

Selected publications

• Understanding the Psychological Distress of Food Insecurity: A Qualitative Study of Children’s Experiences and Related Coping Strategies

  Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics · 2020 · 76 citations

  DOI

• Maternal Stress During Pregnancy Predicts Infant Infectious and Noninfectious Illness

  The Journal of Pediatrics · 2020 · 49 citations

  DOI

• Diet Quality and Breast Cancer Recurrence and Survival: The Pathways Study

  JNCI Cancer Spectrum · 2021 · 40 citations

  Background: Prior research suggests a relationship between overall diet quality and breast cancer survival, although few studies have reported on this topic. We evaluated whether 4 dietary quality indices consistent with healthy eating recommendations around the time of breast cancer diagnosis were associated with risk of recurrence, cause-specific, and all-cause mortality. Methods: A total of 3660 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer were included. Diet was assessed an average of 2.3 (ra…

  DOI

• Community Eligibility Provision and School Meal Participation among Student Subgroups

  Journal of School Health · 2020 · 31 citations

  BACKGROUND: The National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs help to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) enables high-poverty schools to offer breakfast and lunch at no cost to all students. This study examines associations between CEP and participation among students eligible for free or reduced-price meals ("FRPM"), possibly eligible ("near-cutoff"), or ineligible ("full-price"). METHODS: Using data from the 2013-2015 Healthy Communities Stud…

  PublisherDOI

• Essential Nutrients, Added Sugar Intake, and Epigenetic Age in Midlife Black and White Women

  JAMA Network Open · 2024-07-29 · 24 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Importance: Nutritive compounds play critical roles in DNA replication, maintenance, and repair, and also serve as antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agents. Sufficient dietary intakes support genomic stability and preserve health. Objective: To investigate the associations of dietary patterns, including intakes of essential nutrients and added sugar, and diet quality scores of established and new nutrient indices with epigenetic age in a diverse cohort of Black and White women at midlife. Design…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Race, stress and dysregulated eating: Maternal to child transmission of obesity

  NIH · $2.6M · 2014–2020

• NIH Grant K01HD047122

  NIH · $497k · 2011

• NIH Grant R01DK080744

  NIH · $3.0M · 2015

Frequent coauthors

• Elissa S. Epel

  University of California, San Francisco

  132 shared

• Nancy E. Adler

  125 shared

• Cindy W. Leung

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  64 shared

• Elissa S. Epel

  University of California, San Francisco

  64 shared

• Nicole R. Bush

  Cohort (United Kingdom)

  63 shared

• Cassandra Vieten

  University of California, San Diego

  49 shared

• Michael Coccia

  University of California, San Francisco

  48 shared

• Karen Jones‐Mason

  University of California, San Francisco

  42 shared

Education

• PhD, MPH, Public Health Nutrition

  University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

  1999

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Ronald Dahlh-74
• Rachel Morello-Froschh-68
• Lia Fernaldh-58