Obesity and eating disorders: A developmental perspective

Abstract

The development of the controls of food intake during the early years of life is discussed, with particular emphasis on the possible role of early experience in the development of eating disorders and obesity. During the first years of life, the change from suckling to feeding occurs. The infant’s successful transition from reliance on a single food to consuming a varied diet is essential to adequate growth and health. Infants are probably the only depletion-driven human eaters. By the end of the preschool period, eating occurs as a result of a complex interaction of social, cultural, and environmental factors with physiological cues. Learning and early experience of food and eating play a central role in the development of food-acceptance patterns. During the early years, children are introduced to the diet of their culture and acquire food preferences and aversions, and they learn rules of cuisine, such as when to eat, and even how much to eat. A major theme of this review is that learning, and especially associative conditioning to the social contexts and the physiological consequences of eating, makes major contributions to the formation of food-acceptance patterns during early childhood. This view implicates early experience of eating in the development of individual differences in styles of intake control and could be heuristically useful in the investigation of the etiology of eating disorders and obesity.