Kiara Amaro-Rivera and Deniz Azarmanesh, NAL members and doctoral students in the Department of Nutrition, presented their research at Nutrition 2018, the inaugural meeting of the American Society for Nutrition, held in Boston.

Amaro-Rivera presented her poster, titled: “Associations between Hair Cortisol Concentration, Anthropometric Measures and Macronutrient Intakes among First-Year College Students.” Her presentation was based on an analysis among 192 freshmen students’ participants of the UMass Healthy Campus Study (140 women and 52 men, mean aged 18.4 years). She found that for a 10% increase in hair cortisol concentration, body mass index increases by 0.28% and waist circumference by 0.20% among the participants.

Azarmanesh presented her poster, titled: “Associations between Acute Stress and Added Sugar Intake among participants in the UMass Healthy Campus Study.” Her presentation was based on an analysis of 215 first-year college students (65 men and 150 women, mean age 18.9 years). Using the Acute Stress Questionnaire, which includes four domains (Social, Authority, Home, and School), she found that among men and women, added sugar intake above the American Heart Association (AHA) recommendation of 25g for women, and 36g for men per day was associated with higher stress for Social (1.80-unit increase, p=0.03) and Home (1.97-unit increase, p=0.05) domains in unadjusted models. Observations were attenuated after adjusting for total energy.