Diet and Behavior

Debate remains on whether interventions focusing on emotion-driven impulsiveness or psychosocial well-being are more effective at reducing unhealthy eating choices. Do et al. (2024) sought to examine the (separate) causal effects of emotion-driven impulsiveness and psychosocial well-being on the inclination for sweet and fat-rich foods in a population of European teenagers. The authors collected self-reported data on fat inclination (range: 0 to 72.6), sweet inclination (score range: 0 to 68.4), psychosocial well-being using the KINDLR Questionnaire, and emotion-driven eagerness using the UPPS-P negative urgency subscale, from a sample of 2065 participants in the IDEFICS/I.Family cohort (mean age: 13.4 years). Moreover, the authors investigated the potential presence of an indirect relationship between psychological well-being and the tendency to be inclined towards fats and sweets, which would be facilitated through emotion-driven impulsiveness. The authors noted that, in the hypothetical scenario where all adolescents possessed high levels of psychosocial well-being relative to poor ones, an average reduction in the inclination for sweet consumption would be observed, in addition to a more modest degree of reduction in the inclination for fats. Likewise, average fat and sweet inclination would decrease if all teenagers had higher levels of emotion-driven impulsiveness than low levels, as seen through the indirect effect of psychosocial well-being via emotion-driven impulsiveness for average sweet and fat inclination. The authors conclude that, regarding their research inquiry, an intervention aimed at emotion-driven impulsiveness would be somewhat more successful in lowering teenagers' inclination toward sweets and fat than those targeting psychosocial well-being.