Tom Baranowski

Tom Baranowski
Baylor College of Medicine | BCM · Department of Pediatrics

PhD

About

619
Publications
162,113
Reads
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Introduction
I am an applied behavioral scientist interested in diverse issues around childhood obesity prevention. I have different levels of understanding of behavioral theory, intervention design, developmental psychology, parenting, serious games for health, dietary intake assessment, objective measurement of diet and screen media use, and biological models alternative to simple energy balance (e.g. microbiome, biological rhythms).
Additional affiliations
August 1999 - April 2016
Baylor College of Medicine
Position
  • Senior Member, Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity Group

Publications

Publications (619)
Article
Purpose Social support, particularly from family, is crucial for physical activity (PA) among youth. This study examined the association between father support and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in Latina pre-teens and explored the moderating role of body mass index (BMI). Design Cross-sectional analysis. Setting Baseline data from...
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This study reports the modeling of three categories of ineffective vegetable parenting practices (IVPP) separately (responsive, structure, and control vegetable parenting practices). An internet survey was employed for a cross sectional assessment of parenting practices and cognitive-emotional variables. Parents (n = 307) of preschool children (3-5...
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Introduction Obesity during childhood is a critical public health issue. The summer break from school is a time when children are prone to accelerated weight gain. We aimed to investigate how obesity prevention or treatment programs implemented over the summer affect anthropometric measures or weight‐related behaviors. Methods Published studies ex...
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We have developed a population-level method for dietary assessment using low-cost wearable cameras. Our approach, EgoDiet, employs an egocentric vision-based pipeline to learn portion sizes, addressing the shortcomings of traditional self-reported dietary methods. To evaluate the functionality of this method, field studies were conducted in London...
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TV viewing is associated with health risks, but existing measures of TV viewing are imprecise due to relying on self-report. We developed the Family Level Assessment of Screen use in the Home (FLASH)-TV, a machine learning pipeline with state-of-the-art computer vision methods to measure children’s TV viewing. In three studies, lab pilot (n = 10),...
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Background Shared plate eating (SPE), defined as two or more individuals eating directly from the same plate or bowl, is a common household food consumption practice in many Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Examination of household engagement in SPE remains largely unexplored, highlighting a gap in research when interpreting dietary inform...
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Background Older adult women often do not engage in sufficient physical activity (PA) and can encounter biological changes that exacerbate the negative effects of inadequate activity. Wearable activity monitors can facilitate PA initiation, but evidence of sustained behavior change is lacking. Supplementing wearable technologies with intervention c...
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The rising prevalence of overweight and obesity, alongside micronutrient deficiencies, particularly among women and children, is a major public health concern in Ghana. In this study, we assessed the energy and nutrient intakes of Ghanaian mothers and children in rural and urban households, using the researcher-conducted weighed food records, and c...
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Recruitment of research participants often has not obtained a desired sample size, thereby becoming a major problem inhibiting investigators’ ability to adequately test the specified hypotheses. Social marketing with its four Ps, originally developed by the business world to sell products and adapted for public health initiatives, is proposed as a...
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Screen use, including TV viewing, among children is associated with their physical and mental development. The most common assessment of TV viewing are self-reports and these introduce significant error. Objective measures are needed to improve research approaches to inform screen use guidelines. We present an objective approach to assess TV viewin...
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Background: Accurate estimation of dietary intake is challenging. However, whilst some progress has been made in high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain behind, contributing to critical nutritional data gaps. This study aimed to validate an objective, passive image-based dietary intake assessment method against weigh...
Preprint
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Background: Accurate estimation of dietary intake is challenging. But whilst some progress has been made in high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain behind, contributing to critical nutritional data gaps. This study aimed to validate an objective, passive image-based dietary intake assessment method against weighed foo...
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Introduction Dietary assessment is important for understanding nutritional status. Traditional methods of monitoring food intake through self-report such as diet diaries, 24-hour dietary recall, and food frequency questionnaires may be subject to errors and can be time-consuming for the user. Methods This paper presents a semi-automatic dietary as...
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Consuming an unhealthy diet increases health risks. This study assessed the impact of a culturally adapted behaviorally innovative obesity prevention intervention (The Butterfly Girls and the Quest for Founder’s Rock) on diet quality in pre-adolescent non-Hispanic Black/African American girls. The RCT consisted of three groups (experimental, compar...
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Research has supported the effectiveness of narratives for promoting health behavior, but different narrative presentation formats (serial vs. episodic) have seldom been compared. Suspense theories suggest that serial narratives, which do not provide a full resolution at the end of an episode, may create higher motivation for continued engagement w...
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Objective Accurate measurement of adult and child screen media use are needed to robustly assess its impact on health outcomes. Our objective was to systematically review screen media use measurement tools that have been validated against an objective “gold standard” tool. Methods The search strategy was initially conducted in Medline Ovid and tra...
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Background: Hispanic/Latina girls have a low prevalence of moderate-intensity physical activity (PA) compared to their male counterparts and non-Hispanic White girls. Mothers influence their children's activity levels by creating and supporting PA opportunities, modeling PA, and reinforcing children's efforts to be physically active. The Conmigo t...
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Camera-based passive dietary intake monitoring is able to continuously capture the eating episodes of a subject, recording rich visual information, such as the type and volume of food being consumed, as well as the eating behaviors of the subject. However, there currently is no method that is able to incorporate these visual clues and provide a com...
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Objective: The current study examined school-summer differences in children's sleep patterns and sleep hygiene. Cross-sectional relationships with children's sleep, sleep hygiene, and weight status were explored during the school year and summer. Methods: Children (5-8 years) and their parents (n = 197 dyads) were recruited from 4 schools in sou...
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BACKGROUND Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of hospitalization among older adults in the U.S. There are significant racial and geographic disparities in HF outcomes, with patients living in southern U.S. states suffering a mortality rate 69% higher than the national average. Self-management behaviors, particularly daily weight-monitoring and...
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Background: Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of hospitalization among older adults in the United States. There are substantial racial and geographic disparities in HF outcomes, with patients living in southern US states having a mortality rate 69% higher than the national average. Self-management behaviors, particularly daily weight monitor...
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Background eHealth interventions using active video games (AVGs) offer an alternative method to help children exercise, especially during a pandemic where options are limited. There is limited data on costs associated with developing and implementing such interventions. Objectives We quantified the costs of delivering an eHealth RCT intervention a...
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Background There is a strong association between increased mobile device use and worse dietary habits, worse sleep outcomes, and poor academic performance in children. Self-report or parent-proxy report of children’s screen time has been the most common method of measuring screen time, which may be imprecise or biased. Objective The objective of t...
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In our recent dietary assessment field studies on passive dietary monitoring in Ghana, we have collected over 250k in-the-wild images. The dataset is an ongoing effort to facilitate accurate measurement of individual food and nutrient intake in low and middle income countries with passive monitoring camera technologies. The current dataset involves...
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Background Preschool-aged children’s physical activity (PA) and screen time (ST) are important health-related behaviours likely influenced by PA opportunities, parental perceptions of neighbourhood safety and parenting practices pertaining to PA and ST. How these factors interact to impact on young children’s PA and ST, and whether their effects ar...
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Objective Passive, wearable sensors can be used to obtain objective information in infant feeding, but their use has not been tested. Our objective was to compare assessment of infant feeding (frequency, duration, duration and cues) by self-report and that of the Automatic Ingestion Monitor-2 (AIM-2). Design A cross-sectional pilot study was condu...
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Background: While children have been shown to have increased BMI during the summer compared to the school year, it is not known if this may be due to seasonal variations in height or weight separately. Methods: Trained nurses measured heights (cm) and weights (kg) in a cohort of Kindergarteners (n = 7648) twice per year from the beginning of kinder...
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Background: Television viewing among children is associated with developmental and health outcomes, yet measurement techniques for television viewing are prone to errors, biases, or both. Objective: This study aims to develop a system to objectively and passively measure children's television viewing time. Methods: The Family Level Assessment...
Preprint
BACKGROUND The i♥rhythm project is an mHealth adaptation of interpersonal social rhythm therapy designed to promote healthy sleep and behavioral rhythms among 5–8-year-olds during summer for the prevention of accelerated summer weight gain. OBJECTIVE This pilot study will examine the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the i♥rh...
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Background The i♥rhythm project is a mobile health adaptation of interpersonal and social rhythm therapy designed to promote healthy sleep and behavioral rhythms among 5-8-year olds during summer for the prevention of accelerated summer weight gain. Objective This pilot study will examine the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of...
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Knowing the amounts of energy and nutrients in an individual’s diet is important for maintaining health and preventing chronic diseases. As electronic and AI technologies advance rapidly, dietary assessment can now be performed using food images obtained from a smartphone or a wearable device. One of the challenges in this approach is to computatio...
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Background Caregivers’ influence on young children’s eating behaviors is widely recognized. Nutritional interventions that focus on the promotion of children’s healthy diet should actively involve parents, focusing on their feeding behaviors and practices. Methods This work aims to describe the development and study protocol of the SmartFeeding4Ki...
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The optimal approach to feeding preschool children balances expectation setting (demandingness) with responsivity to the child (responsiveness), and ideal feeding practices use environmental structuring and covert, non-directive control strategies while maintaining responsiveness. However, research has not examined the extent to which demandingness...
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Parents influence their child's vegetable intake through their feeding style, i.e. the emotional tone established around feeding, and vegetable parenting practices (VPPs), i.e. the specific behaviors employed to influence their child's vegetable intake. A model of precision food parenting proposes that child healthy dietary intake could be optimize...
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Precision medicine, nutrition and behavioral interventions are attempting to move beyond the specification of therapies applied to groups, since some people benefit, some do not and some are harmed by the same therapy. Instead, precision therapies are attempting to employ diverse sets of data to individualize or tailor interventions to optimize the...
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There is little information on the determinants of healthy sleep habits (HSH) among women of childbearing age (WOCBA). The objective was to identify WOCBA’s beliefs on HSH based on the Reasoned Action Approach. Thirty WOCBA (18–41 years) were randomly assigned to answer questions regarding one of three HSH: avoiding screen use in bed; avoiding caff...
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Obesity prevention interventions generally have either not worked or had effects inadequate to mitigate the problem. They have been predicated on the simple energy balance model, which has been severely questioned by biological scientists. Numerous other etiological mechanisms have been proposed, including the intestinal microbiome, which has been...
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Objectives and background Social demands of the school-year and summer environment may affect children’s sleep patterns and circadian rhythms during these periods. The current study examined differences in children’s sleep and circadian-related behaviors during the school-year and summer and explored the association between sleep and circadian para...
Preprint
Full-text available
Camera-based passive dietary intake monitoring is able to continuously capture the eating episodes of a subject, recording rich visual information, such as the type and volume of food being consumed, as well as the eating behaviours of the subject. However, there currently is no method that is able to incorporate these visual clues and provide a co...
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Full-text available
Background Games for health are a promising approach to health promotion. Their success depends on achieving both experiential (game) and instrumental (health) objectives. There is little to guide game for health (G4H) designers in integrating the science of behavior change with the art of game design. Objective The aim of this study is to extend...
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BACKGROUND Games for health are a promising approach to health promotion. Their success depends on achieving both experiential (game) and instrumental (health) objectives. There is little to guide game for health (G4H) designers in integrating the science of behavior change with the art of game design. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to extend...
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Objective Qualitatively assess culturally adapted lifestyle intervention, Papás Saludables, Niños Saludables (PSNS; Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids), for Hispanic fathers and children. Methods Semistructured interviews of parents and children after participation in 10-week PSNS program for Hispanic fathers and children. Qualitative data double-coded in...
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Objective: To understand how adolescents define related nutrition terms; and use food groups to classify commonly-consumed foods into the MyPlate® food groups. Design: Qualitative study with telephone interviews Setting: Houston metropolitan area, USA. Participants: Convenience sample of 21 adolescents from a volunteer database of the research c...
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Purpose There has been a call to improve measurement rigour and standardization of food parenting practices measures, as well as aligning the measurement of food parenting practices with the parenting literature. Drawing from an expert-informed conceptual framework assessing three key domains of food parenting practices (autonomy promotion, control...
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Background Many tools have been developed to measure physical activity parenting practices (PAPP). Currently, there is little standardization on how PAPP constructs are operationalized for 5–12 year-old children. Given this lack of consistency our team have started the process of standardizing the measurement of PAPP by developing an item bank whic...
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Being able to draw accurate conclusions from childhood obesity trials is important to make advances in reversing the obesity epidemic. However, obesity research sometimes is not conducted or reported to appropriate scientific standards. To constructively draw attention to this issue, we present 10 errors that are commonly committed, illustrate each...
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Background Although physical activity (PA) has been shown in helping prevent and treat obesity, current PA interventions are still not effective in ameliorating the obesity epidemic. Additional forms of PA need to be investigated to improve PA engagement and outcomes. We hypothesize that pairing a narrative (i.e., story) with an active video game (...
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Background: Hispanic children and men carry a high burden for obesity and associated medical conditions. Healthy Dads Healthy Kids was the first obesity prevention intervention targeting fathers and demonstrated weight loss among fathers and behavior change among fathers and children in Australia. The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility...
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Background: Healthy Dads Healthy Kids (HDHK) is a unique lifestyle obesity intervention for fathers and children that demonstrated weight loss among the fathers and behavior change among fathers and children in Australia. The program is gender-tailored to specifically target fathers for weight loss and 5-12 year old children for obesity prevention...
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Background Food preparation interventions are an increasingly popular target for hands-on nutrition education for adults, children, and families, but assessment tools are lacking. Objective data on home cooking practices, and how they are interpreted through different data collection methods, are needed. Objective The goal of this study was to exp...
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Purpose Increased cardiovascular disease and second cancer risks among childhood cancer survivors (CCS) makes them and their families important audiences for nutrition intervention. Family meals and home cooking practices have been associated with improved diet and health, but there is a gap in the literature on understanding these behaviors and th...
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Malnutrition is a major concern in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), but the full extent of nutritional deficiencies remains unknown largely due to lack of accurate assessment methods. This study seeks to develop and validate an objective, passive method of estimating food and nutrient intake in households in Ghana and Uganda. Household memb...
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Background: Accurately measuring parents' attitudes and beliefs regarding limiting their children's TV viewing is important to inform the design and evaluation of effective interventions. This manuscript assesses the internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and construct validity of the Model of Goal Directed...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Accurately measuring parents’ attitudes and beliefs regarding limiting their children’s TV viewing is important to inform the design and evaluation of effective interventions. This manuscript assesses the internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and construct validity of the Model of Goal Directed...
Article
Objective: To develop a conceptual model of determinants of parent feeding behaviors with preschoolers. Design: Semistructured in-depth interviews were collected and transcribed verbatim. Setting: University of Houston. Participants: Parents of preschool-aged children (aged 2-5 years). Phenomenon of interest: Determinants of parent behavio...
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Messages containing descriptive norms have been manipulated and tested for effects on dietary intake in a number of studies. The effects have been mostly small or nonexistent. This narrative review analyzed the structural elements of the nutrition messages most likely related to effectiveness. Elements examined included the following: source, simil...
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Objective Survival rates for paediatric cancers have increased dramatically since the 1970s, but childhood cancer survivors (CCS) are at increased risk for several chronic diseases throughout life. Nutrition interventions promoting healthy family meals may support wellness for survivors, but little research has explored CCS family food preparation...
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Careful consideration of the validity and reliability of methods intended to assess dietary intake is central to the robustness of nutrition research. A dietary assessment method with high validity is capable of providing useful measurement for a given purpose and context. More specifically, a method with high validity is well grounded in theory; i...
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Full-text available
Being able to draw accurate conclusions from childhood obesity trials is important to make advances in reversing the obesity epidemic. However, obesity research sometimes is not conducted or reported to appropriate scientific standards. To constructively draw attention to this issue, we present 10 errors that are commonly committed, illustrate each...
Article
Full-text available
To identify food sources of shortfall nutrients consumed by adolescents (n = 3156), data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (2011-2014) were used. Some of the food groups commonly consumed by adolescents made a significant contribution to shortfall nutrient intakes in the diet. Many food sources that provided signifi...
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Pokémon Go™ (PG) is a mobile videogame that requires real-world walking to "catch" augmented reality (AR) virtual creatures. Media attention speculated that extensive physical activity (PA) could result from PG play, which could have public health benefit. Little is known about contextual factors related to PG play and how they may impact play init...
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Purpose of Review This systematic review reports the latest scientific evidence, from cross-sectional and cohort studies, describing the dietary intake of children and adolescents from Brazil. The goal of the review was to describe intakes according to Brazil’s new food classification system (NOVA) which classifies foods according to the degree of...