Abstract
Food insecurity is associated with high body weight for women but not men in affluent Western societies. However, it is not currently known what behavioural or psychological mechanisms drive this association. Moreover, it is also unknown whether only current experience of food insecurity in adulthood is important, or there are lasting effects of childhood experience. We carried out a mock ‘taste test’ where 126 adult volunteers had the opportunity to consume and rate senergy-dense snack foods. Current food insecurity was measured using the standard USDA measure, and in addition, we used a novel measure that also captures childhood experience of food insecurity. As well as the expected gender-specific association between current food insecurity and body weight, we found some evidence for associations between food insecurity and calorie consumption in the taste test, and liking of one of the foods, chocolate. However, associations between current food insecurity and the outcomes were moderated by childhood experience of food insecurity, with greater childhood food insecurity enhancing the positive effect of current food insecurity on body weight, but attenuating the positive effect of food insecurity on calorie consumption and liking for chocolate. These findings are exploratory, but they suggest that any effects of food insecurity in adulthood on eating and the hedonic value of foods may be moderated by childhood experience.
Highlights
Food insecurity (FI), defined as the limited or uncertain ability to acquire nutritionally adequate and safe food in socially acceptable ways (Anderson, 1990), is associated with high body weight for women but not men in affluent Western societies
One possibility is that experience of FI changes people’s motivation to opportunistically consume energy-dense food when this is freely available. We investigated this possibility in a mock taste test where volunteers were given a pretext for eating as much or as little as they liked of three snack foods, and had their current and childhood FI measured
For BMI, we found the pattern typical of previous studies in affluent populations: a positive association between current FI and BMI moderated by gender, the pattern was only statistically significant when using the USDA measure of current FI, and not our novel adult FI (AFI) measure
Summary
Food insecurity (FI), defined as the limited or uncertain ability to acquire nutritionally adequate and safe food in socially acceptable ways (Anderson, 1990), is associated with high body weight for women but not men in affluent Western societies. Nettle et al (2017) argue that the association between FI and high body weight may be causal: humans—human females at least—may possess psychological mechanisms that respond to experiences of FI by motivating them to consume more than they expend when the opportunity is available. Based on the arguments for developmental programming effects in the literature, we expected that childhood FI might explain variation in BMI, consumption, and liking of the foods, above and beyond that explained by adult FI alone We considered both main effects of childhood FI, interactions with gender, and interactions between current FI and childhood FI. The mode of operation of developmental programming in some cases appears to be sensitization of individuals to relevant features of their adult situation (see for example Griskevicius, Tybur, Delton, & Robertson, 2011) This can lead to non-additive interactions between childhood experience and adult context in predicting behaviour. We consider the analyses involving childhood FI to be exploratory, since we have no clear basis for predicting whether there will be additive effects or interactions, or what form interactions might take
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