Dietary intake, food addiction and nutrition knowledge in young people with mental illness

Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study was to comprehensively assess dietary intake, nutrition knowledge and food addiction in young people with mental illness. Methods: This was a three-arm cross-sectional study of 16-25-year-olds attending community mental health services who met criteria for: (i) first-episode psychosis (FEP), (ii) ultra-high risk for psychosis (UHR) or (iii) depression/ anxiety. Participants self-completed three validated questionnaires: (i) Australian Eating Survey, (ii) General Nutrition Knowledge Questionnaire-Revised and (iii) Yale Food Addiction Score Questionnaire. Results: Thirty participants (mean age 19.7 AE 2.5 years) completed the study (10 per study arm); 43% of the energy intake was obtained from energy-dense, non-nutritious foods, higher than the recommended upper limit (<15%) and the levels reported in the general population (35%). Mean diet quality score was 33.5 AE 11.8 of 73. Mean food addiction symptom score was 3.3 AE 3.7. Prevalence of food addiction was 37%. Nutrition knowledge was lower in the FEP and UHR participants than the depression/anxiety group (48.2 AE 13.8 and 49.5 AE 8.2 of 88 respectively); however, this difference was not statistically significant. Conclusions: Unhealthy dietary intake was observed in the early stages of mental illness, likely seeding future poor physical health. Further research is needed on the role of food addiction in this population, including effective intervention techniques.

Food Liking-Based Diet Quality Indexes (DQI) Generated by Conceptual and Machine Learning Explained Variability in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors in Young Adults

“…Criterion validity of the liking-based diet quality indexes in the present paper and others [53,60,61] is supported through ability to distinguish diet quality between patients with diagnosed depression versus controls as well as associations with the CRFS. We found lower diet quality across all of the diet quality indexes among those with depression, which agrees with previous literature (e.g., [62][63][64]). The results of this study are similar to those quantifying diet through traditional methods, such as a 24-h recall or food frequency questionnaire [65,66].…”

Western Diet: Implications for Brain Function and Behavior

“…The overavailability of highly rewarding foods might lead to addiction-like behaviors as happens with tobacco, alcohol, and psychoactive drugs (Ziauddeen and Fletcher, 2013;Chen et al, 2017). A growing body of research reports many similarities between conventional addiction disorders and consumption of highly palatable food typical of WD in both animals (Jacques et al, 2019) and humans (Pursey et al, 2015;Teasdale et al, 2020). Some populations self-diagnose themselves as food addicts because of the environment full of hyperpalatable products (Hardman et al, 2015;Ruddock et al, 2019).…”

Current Intervention Treatments for Food Addiction: A Systematic Review

“…Whilst both reviews add valuable insights, they only reviewed a limited scope of interventions. Given treatments for FA could be highly varied due to the strong link with other mental health conditions including disordered eating behaviours [ 5 , 9 , 11 , 26 ], substance use disorders [ 10 ] and increased weight status [ 4 ], there are a range of treatments that could be beneficial for those with addictive eating. The scope and classifications of interventions of interest for the current review, therefore, include those interventions that were not reported in previous reviews such as dietary interventions, lifestyle modifications, medication, and surgery.…”