Kai Ling Kong

University at Buffalo, State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo · Department of Pediatrics

Objective: Consumption of added sugars is contraindicated for infants <2 years old due to potentially harmful metabolic effects. However, recent research revealed that most US-produced infant formulas contain added sugars. The current study examined the proportion of added sugars in US infant formulas to determine whether US formulas contain primar...

Background: Emerging evidence suggests that low socioeconomic status (SES) home environments may play a role by promoting excess energy intake through a lack of access to non-food reinforcers. Because of the deleterious effects of SES-related disparities on child health and development, feasible and culturally acceptable interventions are urgently...

Purpose of Review While some parenting interventions designed for early-life obesity prevention have demonstrated short-term success, there is limited evidence of longer-term impacts and feasibility with underrepresented populations. The goal of this review was to examine existing general parenting programs for parents of children 0–5 years that we...

Emerging evidence suggests that low socioeconomic status (SES) home environments may play a role by promoting excess energy intake through a lack of access to non-food reinforcers. Because of the deleterious effects of SES related disparities on child health and development, feasible and culturally acceptable interventions are urgently needed. Comm...

The first years of life are critical for language development. Numerous studies indicate that actively participating in music creates a neural processing advantage in brain regions that support language development. Nevertheless, shared social characteristics between music and language may also play a role in explaining the benefits of music engage...

Effortful control (EC), a self‐regulation skill, is associated with long‐term developmental outcomes. Music has been associated with infant self‐regulation and may be an intervention strategy for enhancing EC during toddlerhood. This investigation included 32 parent‐child dyads from a previously conducted randomized controlled trial (RCT). Particip...

The early language environment, especially high‐quality, contingent parent–child language interactions, is crucial for a child's language development and later academic success. In this secondary analysis study, 89 parent–child dyads were randomly assigned to either the Music Together® (music) or play date (control) classes. Children were 9‐ to 15‐...

Background Research has shown that early exposure to added sugars from table food is related to increased intake of added sugars in later childhood. The earliest window of exposure to added sugars may be in infancy via infant formula. However, beyond the well-established factors of maternal lifestyle and modeling, there is a lack of research examin...

Substance use during pregnancy increases the risk for poor developmental outcomes of the offspring, and for substance-dependent mothers, abstaining from substance use during pregnancy is often difficult. Given the addictive nature of many substances, strategies that may mitigate the harmful effects of prenatal substance exposure are important. Pren...

Background: Parent-child interactions are linked to childhood obesity. Music enrichment programs enhance parent-child interactions and may be a strategy for early childhood obesity prevention. Objective: We implemented a 2-year randomized, controlled trial to assess the effects of a music enrichment program (music, n = 45) vs. active play date c...

Underrepresentation of pregnant populations in randomized controlled trials of lifestyle change interventions is concerning due to high attrition and providers' limited clinical time. The purpose of this evaluative study was to assess intervention uptake of pregnant individuals enrolled in a three-arm feasibility randomized controlled trial, electr...

Snacking starts early in childhood, yet little is known about child versus family influences on snacking during infancy and toddlerhood. This secondary analysis of baseline data examined associations of child characteristics (e.g., appetitive traits, temperament), caregiver feeding decisions, and sociodemographic characteristics with the mean frequ...

Background Previous animal model studies have highlighted a role for cholesterol and its oxidized derivatives (oxysterols) in uterine contractile activity, however, a lipotoxic state associated with hypercholesterolemia may contribute to labor dystocia. Therefore, we investigated if maternal mid-pregnancy cholesterol and oxysterol concentrations we...

Background Although the association between prenatal tobacco exposure and child obesity risk is well‐established, less is known about co‐exposure to tobacco and cannabis. Objective Determine the relation between prenatal substance co‐exposure and obesity risk. Methods In a diverse sample of pregnant women, we examined the association between pren...

Intake of added sugars during early life is associated with poor health outcomes. Maternal dietary intake influences the intake of their children, but little research investigates the relationship between maternal sugar sweetened beverage (SSB) and infant/toddler added sugar intakes. Our objective was to explore the relationship between maternal to...

Background: Food reinforcement or one's motivation to eat may be established early in life; it might not be the food reinforcement per se that drives weight gain, but rather the imbalance between food and nonfood reinforcement. Objectives: We implemented a 2-y randomized, controlled trial to assess the effects of a music enrichment program (musi...

General parenting interventions have improved parent-child relationships and child behavior, with emerging evidence that they may also reduce prevalence of pediatric overweight/obesity. We conducted a systematic review on interventions that were designed to promote positive parenting and examined child weight post-hoc. We searched for studies publi...

Objectives To understand how a mother's dietary intakes are related to an infant's added sugar intakes. Methods A cross-sectional analysis on data obtained from food frequency questionnaires and three 24-h dietary recalls, respectively, pertaining to the dietary intakes of 101 mothers (age 32.6 ± 4.3 years) and their infants (age 11.8 ± 1.8 years,...

Background An excessive rise in maternal lipids during pregnancy may have detrimental impacts on maternal and fetal health leading to adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, knowledge gaps exist with respect to the association between lipid biomarkers and birth outcomes. Methods We conducted a secondary data analysis of healthy pregnant women (N = 25...

Objective To quantify the change in availability of hyper-palatable foods (HPF) in the US foods system over 30 years (1988 to 2018). Design Three datasets considered representative of the US food system were used in analyses to represent years 1988, 2001, and 2018. A standardized definition from Fazzino et al (2019) that specifies combinations of...

Background Current dietary guidelines recommend avoiding foods and beverages with added sugars and higher sodium before 2 years of age. Objective The aim was to describe daily snack food intake (frequency, energy) and the associations with overconsumed nutrients (added sugars, sodium, saturated fats) and child weight-for-length (WFL) z-scores. De...

Background: Most observational research examining factors in the home environment that contribute to child adiposity has focused on feeding and physical activity, although aspects of one's nonfood home environment such as parent-child interactions can also impact body weight. The main objectives of this study were to determine if parent-infant inte...

Parental obesity is linked to offspring obesity, though little research has explored factors that might influence this relationship during the complementary feeding period. This study investigated whether infant intakes of added sugars mediate the relationship between a mother’s pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and infant rapid weight gain (defi...

Background: Early childhood eating behaviors and temperament have been linked to excess weight gain in separate lines of research. However, the interplay among these variables along with maternal prepregnancy body mass index (BMI) in predicting rapid weight gain is poorly understood. Methods: This observational study tested superfactors of early ch...

Background Formulas often contain high amounts of added sugars, though little research has studied their connection to obesity. Objectives This study assessed the contribution of added sugars from formulas during complementary feeding on total added sugar intakes, and the association between these sugars and upward weight-for-age percentile (WFA%)...

Objective: To characterize the prevalence of hyperpalatable foods (HPF) among baby foods in the U.S. and examine the prevalence of HPF exposure and consumption from both baby food and adult food sources among infants aged 9–15 months. Methods: A U.S. baby food database as well as baby foods from three 24-h dietary recalls of 147 infants were used t...

Background Consumption of added sugars is linked to excess adiposity in older age groups and breastfeeding has been shown to protect against later obesity. Objectives This investigation aimed to determine whether intake of added sugars associates with rapid weight gain in individuals under 2 years of age, if intake of added sugars associates with...

(1) Background: The recommendation for screen use among preschool-aged children is ≤ 1 h per day. We aimed to assess the relationship between parental and child screen use and home environment characteristics. (2) Methods: Thirty-six 3–to-4-year-old healthy children were recruited. Parents reported their own and their child’s weekday and weekend da...

Background: Individual differences in appetitive traits present in the first few weeks of life. Research has shown that infants with a greater food reinforcement ratio (FRR) have higher obesity risk. To date, limited work has examined the relation between FRR and appetitive traits of infants, and how FRR relates to appetitive traits and obesity de...

The relative reinforcing value (RRV) of food captures individual differences in the motivation to eat and is associated with weight status among infants, children, and adults. Currently, there is no concurrent measure of the RRV of food versus a non-food alternative for 4-to-5-year-old children. The present study aimed to develop and validate a mea...

Objective: This study aimed to understand the protective role of positive mother-infant interactions in the context of food and nonfood behaviors against obesity risk later in life among a cohort of low-income children at high prenatal risk due to maternal substance use during pregnancy. Methods: The sample consisted of 216 mother-infant dyads (...

There is growing evidence of an association between the relative reinforcing value of food (RRVF; how hard a child is willing to work for a food versus a non-food reinforcer) and weight across many life stages, but few studies have examined this association among preschool age children. This study investigated the association between the RRVF (meas...

Rapid infant weight gain predicts childhood obesity. We aimed to estimate effect size and identify critical timing for intervention-assisted smoking cessation during pregnancy to impact infant weight gain. We followed 25 mother–infant dyads in the UB Pregnancy and Smoking Cessation Study (Buffalo, NY, USA). Maternal smoking status was biochemically...

Excessive gestational weight gain (GWG) in pregnancy may be driven in part by greater motivation to eat, and studying the relative reinforcing value of food versus non-food commodities may provide insight into factors important for excessive GWG. This study was a cross-sectional examination of the relationship between women meeting the Institute of...

We present a custom-made device that enables the study of food reinforcement in infants younger than nine months. This device called INFERS (INfant FEeding Reinforcement System) consists of a smart feeding controller and milk delivery components which has been constructed using custom and off-the-shelf components. Testing on three infants to date s...

The relative reinforcing value of food versus engagement in other behaviors may be related to the development of obesity, and interventions to reduce FRR may decrease incidences of the development of future cases of obesity. Our laboratory recently developed a paradigm to measure the reinforcing value of food versus an alternative stimulus (i.e., p...

Objective: Food reinforcement refers to how hard someone is motivated to work to gain access to food. Infant temperament is defined as behavioral styles, or constitutionally based individual differences in reactive and regulatory aspects of behavior. Identifying correlates of food reinforcement, such as infant temperament, may help identify infant...

The motivation to eat, as operationalized by measuring how hard someone will work for food, is cross-sectionally and prospectively related to obesity. Persons high in food reinforcement consume more calories, and energy intake mediates the relationship between food reinforcement and obesity. Research has shown avid sucking for milk in early infancy...

Objective: The reinforcing value of food may be established early in life. Research shows that infant weight status is related to the relative reinforcing value of food versus non-food alternatives (food reinforcing ratio, FRR). The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the effects of a 6-week music enhancement program (Music Together®, n = 14...

Previous studies have shown that early liking, early consumption, and maternal consumption of fruits and vegetables (F&V) each predict children's F&V consumption, but no one has examined the independent contributions of these three correlated factors. We aim to examine the extent to which each of these 3 factors is associated with F&V consumption i...

Effects of maternal leisure time physical activity (LTPA) on paediatric obesity are unknown. The objective of this study was to examine associations of maternal LTPA with offspring overall and central adiposity in mid-childhood. We analysed data from 802 mother-child dyads from Project Viva, a prospective pre-birth cohort study. Women reported aver...

Rapid weight gain in infancy is associated with a higher risk of obesity in children and adults. A high relative reinforcing value of food is cross-sectionally related to obesity; lean children find nonfood alternatives more reinforcing than do overweight/obese children. However, to our knowledge, there is no research on how and when food reinforce...

Objectives: To identify dietary patterns in US infants at age 6 and 12 months, sociodemographic differences in these patterns, and their associations with infant growth from age 6 to 12 months. Methods: We analyzed a subsample (760 boys and 795 girls) of the Infant Feeding Practices Study II (2005-2007). Mothers reported their infants' intakes o...

Few studies have investigated the impact of lifestyle interventions during pregnancy on post-partum weight retention and infant growth. Thirty seven previously non-exercising, overweight or obese pregnant women were randomly assigned to a walking intervention or non-intervention control. For the follow-up study, weight of the mother and weight, len...

aternal obesity is a well-recognised risk factor for preeclampsia during pregnancy, but new research has now shown that losing weight before becoming pregnant can substantially reduce the risk. In a study of nearly 8000 US mothers with repeated pregnancies, the researchers examine the risk of preeclampsia in the second pregnancy according to whethe...

Walking may be a strategy for increasing moderate physical activity (MPA) during pregnancy. To promote MPA among overweight and obese pregnant women, via walking, and to evaluate the impact of the intervention on maternal and birth outcomes. Thirty seven overweight or obese pregnant women were randomly assigned to a walking intervention or control...

Research in understanding the relationship between self‐efficacy (SE) and physical activity participation during pregnancy is limited. Our purpose was to examine the relative contribution of pre‐pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and walking SE in predicting physical activity during pregnancy. Walking SE of 37 overweight and obese pregnant women was a...

To determine glycemic, insulinemic, and satiety indices of 3 types of kefir. This study was divided into 3 phases. In phase 1, 50 g of available carbohydrate from low-fat strawberry kefir or orange kefir was tested, and in phase 2, low-fat plain kefir containing 25 g of available carbohydrates was tested for glycemic index (GI), in both cases compa...

We hypothesized that secoisolariciresinol diglucoside (SDG, Beneflax™) derived from flaxseed, would lower serum cholesterol in hypercholesterolemic humans and that the effect would be correlated with serum lignan metabolites. 90 subjects ingested 0 mg (18 male, 12 female), 150 mg (19 male, 11 female), or 300 mg SDG (, 20 male, 10 female) total dail...

We hypothesized that three types of kefir (Lifewayy Low Fat Strawberry Kefir, ProBugs Kefir, orange flavor, and Lifewayy Low Fat Plain Kefir) would have low glycemic index (GI), high insulinemic index (II) and high satiety index (SI). Secondarily, we hypothesized that there would be no significant correlations among postprandial satiety, glucose an...

Excessive exposure to sunlight can be harmful as the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays cause DNA damage. If this damage is not repaired in human cells, cancer and/or cell death can result. With the incidence of skin cancer growing at an increasing rate, there has been much research directed at finding more effective ways to protect against damage from th...