HHP faculty Dr. Daphne Hernandez's research on the impact of stress factors at home on childhood obesity rates was recently featured by Time Magazine. The article titled "Unhappy Families Can Make Daughters Fat" was published in the April 2015 issue of the magazine. Dr. Hernandez's research was first published in the journal Preventive Medicine under the title "Gender disparities among the association between cumulative family-level stress & adolescent weight status".

Dr. Daphne Hernandez

Below is a excerpt from the article:

Dr. Daphne Hernandez, assistant professor at the University of Houston, wants to figure out why despite our efforts, that rate hasn’t budged. “Many times when we’re designing interventions and prevention programs, they’re done in schools because that’s where we have ease of access to all these kiddos,” she says. “But the issue is that in those interventions, we don’t think about the family environment and what could be happening at home.”

“We really need to think about how we are teaching our adolescents how to deal with stress, and trying not to use food as a way to deal with stress,” Hernandez says. “Perhaps encouraging physical activity is the way we should be going.”

Read the entire article on the Time Magazine website