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Penny Gordon-Larsen, professor in UNC’s department of nutrition and associate dean for Research at the Gilling School, leads the Obesity Creativity Hub — a diverse group of researchers from nutrition to behavioral health to data science who work collaboratively to solve the challenge of obesity.
Officially called the Heterogeneity in Obesity Creativity Hub: Transdisciplinary Approaches for Precision Research and Treatment, the hub was created as part of a UNC research platform to bring researchers together as they work to go beyond one-size-fits-all solutions and predictions.
“One thing that we do know is that once you start to gain weight, it is difficult to lose the weight,” Gordon-Larsen said. “The best thing we can do is really prevent people from that initial weight gain and to help people maintain their body weight at a healthy level.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 42% of adults were obese in 2017-2018, the year for which the most recent data is available. In North Carolina, the prevalence of obesity is 33%, up from 20% in 2000.
“We really have seen that our sedentary lifestyles and our habits of eating away from home, larger portion sizes, all of these factors really play into a considerable amount of weight gain when we look at the population level,” said Gordon-Larsen. “Obesity is a really complex disease, and so we wind up studying obesity from a very molecular and genetic level, all the way up to the societal and policy-level factors that influence behavior and food purchasing and physical activity or individuals across the entire globe.”
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