Eating attitudes of Brazilian adults

• Grant number: 24/07505-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health
• Principal Investigator: Juliana Alvares Duarte Bonini Campos
• Grantee: Bianca Gonzalez Martins
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Farmacêuticas (FCFAR). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Eating attitude represents the individual's relationship with their diet habits, involving feelings, thoughts, motivations, and behaviors. This concept can be investigated from affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. The affective aspect refers to emotions related to eating. The cognitive aspect is focused on thoughts and motivations while the behavioral address the predisposition to eat. Another field of research covers the role of food in triggering emotions and enhancing or inhibiting behavior. It is possible to assess these emotions using implicit (without the subject's interpretation) or explicit methods (using the subject's perception). The aims of this study are i) to investigate the affective, cognitive and behavioral components of adult eating attitudes using psychometric instruments; ii) to compare these components with those observed in previous surveys conducted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic; iii) to investigate the pattern of relationships between aspects of eating attitude (amotivation, external and internal motivations, desire-goal dietary incongruence, satisfaction with dietary behavior, cognitive restraint, uncontrolled eating, emotional eating and negative affect); iv) to verify the emotional reactions to images of different foods of individuals with different eating attitudes using facial expressions, and to compare these results with those obtained with a hedonic scale (explicit method); v) estimate the relationship between emotions elicited by the foods and eating attitudes. The study will be performed in two stages. The first is an epidemiological study to screen groups with different eating attitudes. The second is an experimental design. Sub-samples (groups formed by eating attitudes: favorable vs. unfavorable attitudes) will be exposed to images of food and their facial expressions will be analyzed using the FaceReader® program. The participants will evaluate the food affectively and sensorially (hedonic scale).