We come into the world with enduring predispositions towards food, which interact with environmental factors to influence our eating behaviors and weight trajectories. But our fates are not sealed – by learning more about this process we can identify ways to intervene. To advance this goal this we need to be able to assess appetitive traits such as food cue responsiveness and satiety sensitivity at different developmental stages. Assessment methods might include behavioral measures (e.g. eating behavior tests, psychometric questionnaires), but also biomarkers such as brain responses to food cues measured using fMRI. Evidence from infants, children and adolescents suggests that these indices of appetite differ not only with body weight, but also with familial obesity risk as assessed by parent weight, which reflects both genetic and environmental influences, and may provide a useful predictor of obesity development. Behavioral and neural approaches have great potential to inform each other: examining eating behavior can help us identify meaningful appetitive endophenotypes whose neural bases can be probed, while increasing knowledge of the shared neurobiology underlying appetite, obesity, and related behaviors and disorders may ultimately lead to innovative generalized interventions. Another challenge will be to combine comprehensive behavioral and neural assessments of appetitive traits with measures of relevant genetic and environmental factors within long-term prospective studies. This approach may help to identify the biobehavioral precursors of obesity, and lay the foundations for targeted neurobehavioral interventions that can interrupt the pathway to excess weight.

We live in a world replete with opportunities to overeat highly calorifi c, palatable foods -yet not everyone becomes obese. Why? We propose that individuals show differences in appetitive traits (e.g. food cue responsiveness, satiety sensitivity) that manifest early in life and predict their eating behaviours and weight trajectories. What determines these traits? Parental feeding restriction is associated with higher child adiposity, pressure to eat with lower adiposity, and both strategies with less healthy eating behaviours, while authoritative feeding styles coincide with more positive outcomes. But, on the whole, twin and family studies argue that nature has a greater infl uence than nurture on adiposity and eating behaviour, and behavioural investigations of genetic variants that are robustly associated with obesity (e.g. FTO) confi rm that genes infl uence appetite. Meanwhile, a growing body of neuroimaging studies in adults, children and high risk populations suggests that structural and functional variation in brain networks associated with reward, emotion and control might also predict appetite and obesity, and show genetic infl uence. Together these different strands of evidence support a biobehavioural risk model of obesity development. Parental feeding recommendations should therefore acknowledge the powerful -but modifi able -contribution of genetic and neurological infl uences to children ' s eating behaviour.

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Objective To determine associations between mothers’ feeding behaviors in infancy, and child’s weight from infancy through to toddlerhood, in urban, low-income, minority families, and to explore the contribution of concerns about infant eating/weight. Methods We recruited 169 mother-infant dyads (88% African-American) from an inner city pediatric practice. Questionnaires measuring restrictive feeding, pressuring to eat, and concerns about infant overeating/weight and undereating/weight were administered, and infants weighed and measured, at 6–12 months. Anthropometric data up to 30 months were obtained from multiple (8.9±2.6) well-child visits, with 84% completing 11 visits. Results Higher pressuring was associated with lower WLZ over the period from baseline out to 30 months, and higher restriction with higher child WLZ over the same period. Pressuring and concern about infant undereating/weight were independently associated with WLZ, but the relationship between restrictive feeding and WLZ was reduced by accounting for concern about infant overeating/weight. Child weight trajectories were not influenced by feeding behavior. Conclusions Mothers restricted heavier infants and pressured leaner infants to eat, and the relationship between restriction and higher infant weight was mediated by concern about infant overeating/weight. Correcting misperceptions and discussing feeding with mothers reporting concern may help prevent excessive early weight gain.