Study of eating attitudes, behaviour and information-seeking in relation to sociodemographic and psychological factors among adolescents

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Nutrition is one of the key factors in health maintainance. So developing appropriate eating habits is very important in adolescence. Dietary behaviour may be influenced by certain aspects of personality, e.g., self-efficacy, optimism/pessimism and self-control. We explored adolescents' eating behaviour, attitudes, and information seeking, and their relationship with psychological and sociodemographic factors. Participants were high school students (n = 277; 54% boys; mean age: 16 years; SD = 1.25). Our self-administered questionnaire contained items on sociodemographics, eating behaviour and attitudes, and information-seeking as well as three psychological scales. We explored the main factors of behaviour (health-conscious, nonconscious, raw-based), attitudes (rejecting, ambivalent and accepting), and information-seeking (lay, professional, Internet) using factor analysis. Correlation analyses revealed adolescents' nutrition-related behaviour and attitudes were rather health-conscious, but rejecting and ambivalence in their behaviour and attitudes appeared as well. Self-efficacy, self-control and optimism played a role not only in developing health-conscious behaviour and accepting attitude but also in avoiding the nonconscious behaviour and rejecting attitude. Health-conscious behaviour was associated with higher socioeconomic status and parents' schooling but less with gender. Information-seeking was partly influenced by certain sociodemographics: professional resources were preferred by girls, students from grammar schools, and those with better school achievement. Our data draw attention to the extraordinary importance of mapping adolescent dietary habits; not only their behaviours but also attitudes and information-seeking. This life period is significant in terms of childhood nutrional socialization since youth's decisions become more and more autonomous in this field as well. Orv Hetil. 2018; 159(51): 2183-2192.