Nutritional Sciences Department Highlights

Dr. Robyn Metcalfe has been selected as the director of the University of Texas Nutrition Institute (UTNI). Dr. Metcalfe, a faculty member in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, founded and previously served as director for five years of Food + City, a nonprofit that explored food systems and their future.

Dr. Metcalfe is the author of several books, including The Humans in Our Food, Food Routes, and Meat, Commerce and the City, and she has produced documentary films about food and food systems. More recently, Dr. Metcalfe oversaw an extensive co-creation event with the department and its stakeholders to establish a new vision and strategic plan for UTNI.

Rapid weight gain in the first and final months of a pregnancy may play a key role in the development of excess fat tissue in children and adolescents – at least if those children are girls, according to a new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

In the study, published today in the journal Obesity, nutritional sciences researchers looked at more than 300 pregnant women and followed their children from 5 to 14 years old. The researchers connected patterns of weight change in pregnancy to patterns of their children's body mass index (BMI), waist circumference and body fat percentage changes during childhood and early adolescence.

Getting children to eat their vegetables can seem like an insurmountable task, but nutrition researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found one way: school gardens and lessons on using what's grown in them.

Researchers worked with 16 elementary schools across Central Texas to install vegetable gardens and teach classes to students and parents about nutrition and cooking. In a study recently published in the International Journal for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, the team describes specifically targeting schools with a high percentage of students on the free and reduced-price lunch program to understand how nutrition programs affect low-income groups. Each school was studied for one academic year.

A team of 20 undergraduates from the University of Texas at Austin created a donation-based e-cookbook titled "Food: For the Love of Community" that offers easy recipes and guidance on how to maintain healthy food habits amid the COVID-19 crisis.T

he students make up this year's Coordinated Program in Dietetics, a 3-semester pre-professional program where those enrolled rotate between work in hospitals, food banks and community centers on their way to becoming registered dietitians. Linda Steinhardt, who kick-started the project, said the group's diverse, on-the-ground experiences helped them make the book.

A new study performed by University of Texas at Austin researcher Heather Leidy found that snacking on hummus in the afternoon can improve diet quality, curb hunger and desire to eat, and even improve alertness throughout the day when compared to consuming high sugar snacks or eating no snack at all.

The paper, out today in the Journal of Nutrition, looked at adults who were given afternoon snacks of either red pepper hummus and pretzel crisps, a granola bar, or no snack for 7 days each. Both types of snacks had 240 kcals – the amount that is typically consumed by most Americans.

For about 100 years, scientists have known about the Reissner Fiber, an enigmatic structure inside the spinal canal of vertebrates. What they didn't know was exactly what role the Reissner Fiber played in the formation of the spine during different life stages and what influence it had on spinal conditions like scoliosis, a condition displaying atypical curvatures in the spine.

In a recent paper, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have identified a genetic mechanism behind the formation of the Reissner Fiber and have been able to link the absence of the fiber to scoliosis in zebrafish.