Abstract
Dysfunctional eating behavior is a major risk factor for developing all sorts of eating disorders. Food craving is a concept that may help to understand better why and how these and other eating disorders become chronic conditions through non homeastatically-driven mechanisms. As obesity affects people worldwide, cultural differences must be acknowledged to apply proper therapeutic strategies. In this work, we adapted the Food Craving Inventory (FCI) to the German population. We performed a factor analysis of an adaptation of the original FCI in a sample of 326 men and women. We could replicate the factor structure of the FCI on a German population. The factor extraction procedure produced a factor solution that reproduces the four factors described in the original inventory, the FCI. Our instrument presents high internal consistency, as well as a significant correlation with measures of convergent and discriminant validity. The FCI-Deutsch (FCI-DE) is a valid instrument to assess craving for particular foods in Germany, and it could, therefore, prove useful in the clinical and research practice in the field of obesity and eating behaviors.
Highlights
For a time obesity has been a remarkably significant health issue worldwide
Sixty participants (21 males and 39 females, from age 18 to 41) were recruited from the University of Trier via e-mail digest to fill the preliminary version of the Food Craving Inventory (FCI)-Deutsch (FCI-DE) in a pilot study
25% of our sample (n = 79) was overweight (BMI > 25), which is consistent with the data available on overweight and obesity rates in Germany (Schienkiewitz et al, 2012)
Summary
Obesity has been a remarkably significant health issue worldwide. What initially was thought a simple problem of calories in vs. calories out has turned into a complex, multifactorial condition influenced by genes as well as social environment (Locke et al, 2015; Díez et al, 2016; Perry et al, 2016). Given that the behavioral response to reinforcers (whether natural or artificial) is governed by the same neuronal pathways, this similarity between the brain activation patterns mentioned above gave support to the hypothesis of food addiction. In line with the evidence that supports food addiction as a valid phenotype and phenomenon (Davis et al, 2011), experiencing craving represents a major feature (or symptom) of this construct The attribution of such a pivotal role to craving by most of the addiction research suggests that this attribute is real rather than a mere theoretical construct (Meule and Kübler, 2012; Potenza and Grilo, 2014; Chao et al, 2016). As it happens in drug addiction, (food) cravings are frequently reported among individuals that fit the food addiction descriptors, as defined by the DSM and other instruments developed to explore this condition (Pursey et al, 2014), like the Yale Food Addiction
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