# Teen screen diets and their relationships with dietary intake: setting the stage for precision interventions and evidence-based policies

> **NIH NIH R01** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $755,428

## Abstract

Adolescents’ eating behaviors are influenced by their media environments. However, very little is known
about the food and beverage-related environment that adolescents experience on their smartphones.
Adolescents increasingly interact with the world through smartphone screens that are almost always with
them. Thus, any attempt to study or change policy, systems and environmental influences on
adolescents’ food and beverage preferences, purchases and consumption must consider the nutrition-
related environment and behavior on their smartphone screens. Until now, a comprehensive view of life
experienced on smartphones has been invisible to researchers. We have developed a novel method for
capturing everything that appears on teens’ smartphone screens – a fully encrypted record of digital life –
by taking snapshots of the screen every 5 seconds the devices are on. The resulting sequence of
screenshots, including all words and images on the screen, constitute an individual’s screenome.
We will collect six months of continuous smartphone screenshots and three 24-hour dietary recall
interviews at baseline and after 2, 4, and 6 months, from a national sample of 300 adolescents age 13-
17 years, balanced between female and male, and at least 30% identified as racial/ethnic minority.
Aim 1. Describe the food and beverage environment adolescents experience on their smartphone
screens Using the text and images from smartphone screenomes, we will create the first comprehensive
description of the food and beverage environments being experienced by adolescents on their
smartphones.
Aim 2. Elucidate the between-person relationships between smartphone food and beverage
screenomes and dietary intake. we will examine how differences in digital exposures to food and
beverage screenome features are associated with differences in dietary consumption.
Aim 3. Elucidate the within-person relationships between changes in smartphone food and
beverage screenomes and changes in dietary intakes. Leveraging natural experiments embedded in
the screenome data.
This study will provide the first comprehensive description of the food and beverage environment that
adolescents experience on their smartphones and represents a true paradigm shift in studying media
impacts on adolescents’ eating behaviors. The results of this study will identify novel intervention targets
and opportunities for smartphone-based precision nutrition interventions and evidence-based policies to
improve adolescents’ health.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10889274
- **Project number:** 5R01HL169601-02
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Nicholas Haber
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $755,428
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-07-17 → 2027-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10889274

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10889274, Teen screen diets and their relationships with dietary intake: setting the stage for precision interventions and evidence-based policies (5R01HL169601-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10889274. Licensed CC0.

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