ATTITUDES TO FOODS AND FACTORS

(8+16)

AO1 Parents

As children’s parents usually provide for them, it seems obvious that parental attitudes to food will affect their children’s attitudes toward the food too. This can be explained by SLT. This occurs when children observe their parents eating. In this sense the parents act as eating role model. Observing parents getting rewarded by enjoying eating certain foods, the children earn to imitate these food preferences as they expect to receive similar rewards by doing so. This theory would therefore argue that children should show similar preferences from them through a process of vicarious learning.

AO2

Research support comes from Brown and Ogden who reported consistent correlations between parents and their children in terms of snack food intake, eating motivation and body dissatisfaction. Parental behaviour and attitudes are therefore central to the process of social learning with research highlighting a positive correlation between diets of parents and their children. However an issue is that correlations cannot establish cause and effect and therefore we are unsure as to children’s eating behaviour is because children are imitating parents behaviour or if its children’s food preferences are simply being reinforced. Hence this decreases the reliability of this study as support for the theory.

IDA

The social learning theory could however be regarded as reductionist as it outlines the role of models influencing the food attitudes of young people. However attitudes to food are clearly a product of much more for example the evolutionary approach suggests that our preference for fatty and sweet foods is as a direct result of an evolved adaptation among our distant ancestors over 2million years ago.

AO1 Mood

A second factor influencing attitudes towards food and eating behaviour is mood. For example Individuals with bulimia nervosa tend to experience anxiety prior to a binge-eating episode, despite the fact that binge-eating does not relieve the low-mood state. The same relationship between anxiety and binge-eating is also found in non-clinical populations. Wegner et al. (2002) found that people who binged tended to have low mood before and after binge-eating.

AO2

Another example of the influence of mood is that many people tend to comfort-eat when in a low mood. Garg et al. (2007) observed the food preferences of participants as they watched either an upbeat movie or a sad movie. They found that when they watched the upbeat movie, they were more likely to choose healthy snack, but when watching a depressing movie they went for the short-term pleasure of junk food.

AO2

The relationship between anxiety and binge eating Is supported by research. However Piomelli et al. (2010 found that consuming fats in the form of junk food triggers a binge-eating signal that makes the individual want to eat more of the same. This shows that although low mood may trigger the initial urge to binge it is the consumption of fatty foods that sustains the episode.

AO2

There are challenges to the view that low mood causes comfort-eating. For example, comfort-eating chocolate is more likely to prolong a negative mood when it is used as part of an emotional-eating strategy (Parker e.t al, 2006). This challenges the view that low mood causes comfort eating as it suggests that it may not be that effective in overcoming a low mood.

IDA

Research into factors of eating preferences can be criticised for being culturally and gender biased. The research conducted on mood is predominantly conducted on females, which could lead to beta bias, as any potential differences between males and females could be ignored. This results in a fundamentally flawed impression of how this effects the way we eat.