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Does personality influence eating styles and food choices? Direct and indirect effects
Keller & Siegrist (2015) took a random sample of 951 people from the general population and examined direct and indirect influences of the big five personality traits on eating styles and food choices. While high openness to experience and high agreeableness were both associated with low meat consumption, path models revealed that high openness to experience also equated to lower soft drink intake and high vegetable, fruit and salad consumption. Greater fruit and less meat consumption was also linked to conscientiousness (through promotion of restrained eating and reduction of external eating). In addition to this restrained eating and reduced external eating, those with high conscientiousness were prevented from consuming sweet and savory foods due to emotional eating. On the other hand, neuroticism promoted emotional and external eating and thereby encouraged eating sweet and savory food. Keller & Siegrist (2015) list many associations between personality traits with eating styles and food choices including extraversion with sweet and savory, meat and soft drink intake via advocating external eating. Furthermore, results suggest that neurotic and emotionally unstable individuals seem to adopt counter-regulatory external or emotional eating and eat high-energy dense sweet and savory foods. Whereas, highly conscientious individuals adopt regulatory dietary restraint and practice counter-regulatory emotional or external eating less, resulting in higher consumption of recommended and less intake of foods not recommended. The study found that the higher sociability of extroverted people seems to have negative effects on health. It was concluded that the more proximal, counter-regulatory eating styles such as emotional or external eating might be more successfully addressed in interventions to prevent overeating and overweight. [NPID: personality, big five personality traits, food choice, decision making, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, restrained eating, external eating, neuroticism, emotional eating, extraversion, restraint, overeating, overweight]
Year: 2015
