Biography of Leann L Birch, PhD, 25 June 1946 - 26 May 2019

Women in Nutrition Science: A Biographical Review

PURPOSE OF THE REVIEW

The field of nutrition is in debt to a cadre of women who led the field through its formative years. This review highlights the contributions of these women that are gleaned through analysis of biographical articles published in The Journal of Nutrition.

RECENT FINDINGS

Forces emerged during the development of nutrition science, such as departments of home economics and the majority-female field of dietetics, that suggest women might be well represented in biographical articles in the field of nutrition. However, just 29 women have been the subject of biographical articles in The Journal of Nutrition representing 14.3% of the 202 biographical articles published to date - a percentage lower than scientific journals overall. This review explores these biographies to identify factors that facilitated and hindered careers and to highlight the manifold scientific contributions of women in nutrition science. This review looks toward the past to provide perspective and inspiration for those working in the field of nutrition today.

From food preference development to responsive feeding - Selective studies to commemorate the life and work of Dr Leann Birch

Dr Leann Birch was a pioneer in conducting research on infant and child eating behaviour. At the beginning of her research career, Leann recognised a significant gap in the developmental psychology literature, namely that few studies had been conducted to understand infant eating and feeding behaviours. This seems an unusual omission given that food intake is essential and that developmental milestones from milk to solids, and from being fed to becoming an autonomous eater, are obvious to most caregivers. Leann paved the way for interdisciplinary research from psychology, paediatrics and public health to explore and apply this knowledge to infant and child appetite, eating behaviour, dietary patterns, food preferences, and obesity risk. Early studies in her laboratory demonstrated that children form food preferences through experience and socialisation. Experiments published in 1979 tested the role of familiarisation through repeat exposure, and the impact of instrumental and social learning on the acquisition of food preferences. In 1984, a presentation given to the British Feeding and Drinking Group (BFDG) in Brighton set out three organising principles for understanding how children acquire food preferences: genetically pre-programmed behavioural propensities; social constraints on experience with food; and social transmission resulting from direct social interaction. Building on these three organising principles, research on child eating behaviour has flourished, including the intersection between individual differences, food experience and environmental influences on children's food preferences, energy regulation, and weight outcomes. In this review, the initial groundwork set out by Leann Birch on food preference development in children is considered followed by a discussion of how this has since inspired an interdisciplinary, international and expanding field of research on children's food intake, appetite and body weight regulation.

A synthesis of early antecedents of eating behavior and weight status in girls: The legacy of girls' NEEDS project

Dr. Leann Birch, an innovator in the field of children's eating behavior, was the first scientist to synergize the fields of developmental psychology and nutrition science. One of Leann's groundbreaking projects was the Girls' NEEDS Project (GNP), an NIH-funded observational study of the longitudinal development of eating and weight-related behaviors of girls across middle childhood and adolescence. At the time of GNP, obesity prevalence during childhood had roughly doubled during the previous two decades, research interest in dieting had increased as societal expectations of the 'thin ideal' got even thinner, and little was known about how environmental factors such as parenting influenced the development of maladaptive eating and weight-related behaviors. GNP resulted in over 70 publications, covering a range of topics from girls' dietary intake and physical activity to parental influences on girls' eating behavior, thus laying the groundwork for many topics in the obesity, food parenting, and dieting literature today. Therefore, this narrative review aims to summarize and synthesize the literature that resulted from the GNP and provide implications for future work building from this foundation.