Abstract
Dietary restraint is, together with other risk factors, part of an integrative etiological theory that contemplates direct and mediational mechanisms by which risk factors (ideal and actual figures, body dissatisfaction, ineffectiveness and body mass index) might work together to promote dieting and risky eating behaviors. To gain a better understanding of the risk factors associated with dieting, it was proposed to identify similarities and differences between Mexican and German cultures, and to develop structural models by comparing the interrelations of dieting risk factors. The sample (N = 221) was formed of medical and nursing male students, who completed a survey assessing these risk factors. There were 73 Mexicans and 148 Germans. The mean age of the total sample was M = 20.8 years (SD = 0.71). It was found that Mexican men displayed a higher body mass (t (177) = -4.2 p= .000) and were more dissatisfied with their body (t (184)=-2.9, p=.004), and also showed higher restrictive dieting (t (190) = 2.2, p= .03) than German men did. The hypothesized role of the body dissatisfaction factor was confirmed in both Mexican and German models, body dissatisfaction showed a direct link with dieting (body dissatisfaction predicts dieting), as well as a mediate one between body mass and dieting, and between ideal figure and dieting (dieting is indirectly predicted by body mass or by ideal figure through body dissatisfaction). The relevance of this study is increased by the fact that it is a cross-cultural study, involving Mexican and German samples.
Highlights
It is usually believed that pathologies in eating behavior are only seen in women, and that only recently the males begun to show this problem
It is worth noting that few cross-cultural studies focus on risk factors for the development of anomalous eating behaviors, and there are even fewer studies with men samples and almost none in Latin America
Taking into account that dietary restraint (DR) is an important antecedent to the onset and maintenance of bulimia nervosa (Leon, Fulkerson, Perry, & Early-Zald, 1995; Stice, Nemeroff, & Shaw, 1996; Stice, Stewart, & Hammer, 1998), two proposals addressed this work: 1) to determine differences and similarities between the risk factors distributions for DR by comparing Mexican and German men models, and 2) to develop structural models of the inter-relations among these risk factors, to detect and confirm, the presence of expected results as were postulated by the hypotheses of this study
Summary
It is usually believed that pathologies in eating behavior are only seen in women, and that only recently the males begun to show this problem. For this reason, it is somewhat surprising that Andersen (1990) states that one of the first two reports of anorexia nervosa written by Richard Morton in 1694 was that of a man. As Blyth et al (1981) state, some boys wish to be larger and more muscular, there may be an optimal range of body mass, because overweight boys have significantly lower selfesteem and are more self-conscious than their normal weight counterparts
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