Lorna Rapoport

Development of the Children's Eating Behaviour Questionnaire

Individual differences in several aspects of eating style have been implicated in the development of weight problems in children and adults, but there are presently no reliable and valid scales that assess a range of dimensions of eating style. This paper describes the development and preliminary validation of a parent-rated instrument to assess eight dimensions of eating style in children; the Childrens Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (CEBQ). Constructs for inclusion were derived both from the existing literature on eating behaviour in children and adults, and from interviews with parents. They included responsiveness to food, enjoyment of food, satiety responsiveness, slowness in eating. fussiness, emotional overeating, emotional undereating. and desire for drinks. A large pool of items covering each of these constructs was developed. The number of items was then successively culled through analysis of responses from three samples of families of young children (N = 131; N = 187; N = 218), to produce a 35-item instrument with eight scales which were internally valid and had good test-retest reliability. Investigation of variations by gender and age revealed only minimal gender differences in any aspect of eating style. Satiety responsiveness and slowness in eating diminished from age 3 to 8. Enjoyment of food and food responsiveness increased over this age range. The CEBQ should provide a useful measure of eating style for research into the early precursors of obesity or eating disorders. This is especially important in relation to the growing evidence for the heritability of obesity, where good measurement of the associated behavioural phenotype will be crucial in investigating the contribution of inherited variations in eating behaviour to the process of weight gain.

Young children's food preferences: a comparison of three modalities of food stimuli.

Food preferences are widely agreed to be important determinants of eating behaviour in young children. Existing studies of methods of assessing preferences have suggested tasting and ranking foods can generate reliable responses with young children, but there have been few attempts to assess other methods which might provide a more convenient alternative in situations where the use of real foods could be difficult (e.g. outside the laboratory), or tasting could be undesirable (e.g. if there are large numbers of foods, or foods which children would be unwilling to taste). The present study is a comparison of the reliability of preferences measured using: (i) real foods; (ii) food photographs; and (iii) food models, in 3 to 5-year-old children. The results showed that the tasting method produced good results, replicating existing data from U.S. samples. Food photographs came a close second in reliability but food models produced unreliable rankings, especially in the youngest group. Five-year-olds produced significantly more consistent results than the younger children. These results indicate that using real foods as the stimuli produces the most reliable taste preferences with children in this young age range, but photographs may provide a convenient alternative with adequate reliability.

Randomized trial of the effects of cholesterol-lowering dietary treatment on psychological function.

PURPOSE Epidemiological studies have suggested that cholesterol lowering could affect psychological functioning. This study was designed to test whether cholesterol-lowering diets adversely affect mood and cognitive function.5.2 mM [198 mg/dL]) to either a low-fat diet, a Mediterranean diet, or a waiting-list control. Cholesterol levels, psychological well-being (depression, anxiety, hostility), and cognitive function were assessed at baseline, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks. RESULTS Total serum cholesterol levels fell significantly more in the intervention groups (8.2% reduction) than in the control group (P <0.001). All three groups showed a modest improvement in psychological well-being during the 12-week treatment period, but there were no differences among the groups. There were no between-group differences on three measures of cognitive function, but for a fourth measure, which involved the task with the greatest processing load, the two intervention groups did significantly worse (P <0.001) than the control group. The change in performance was correlated with the change in total serum cholesterol level (r = 0. 21, P = 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Two dietary interventions that successfully lowered serum cholesterol levels had no adverse effect on mood. There was some evidence for a relative impairment in cognitive function in the treated groups in one of four cognitive tests, but additional studies will be required to determine the relevance of this finding.