Executive functioning and disinhibited eating in children and adolescents

Abstract

Background: Executive functioning (EF) difficulties may be associated with problems regulating eating behaviours. Few studies have evaluated this question in youth using diverse measures of EF or objective measures of energy intake. Methods:The current study used neuropsychological tasks and a laboratory test meal to evaluate the links between EF and youth's disinhibited eating patterns.Two-hundred-five nontreatment seeking youth (M age = 13.1 ± 2.8 years; M BMIz = 0.6 ± 1.0; 33.2% overweight; 54.1% female) completed tasks measuring decision making, general and food-specific behavioural disinhibition, willingness to delay gratification for food and money, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Age (children vs adolescents) was examined as a moderator. All analyses adjusted for demographic factors, pubertal status, lean mass (kg), fat mass (%), height, general intellectual functioning, and depressive symptoms.Results: After adjusting for multiple comparisons, more general behavioural disinhibition was associated with greater total energy intake (P = .02), and poorer cognitive flexibility was associated with more fat intake (P = .03) across all ages. Poorer decision making in children (P = .04), but not adolescents (P = .24), was associated with greater fat intake. Food-specific behavioural disinhibition, the ability to delay gratification for both food and monetary rewards, and working memory were not significantly associated with youth's disinhibited eating patterns during a single meal.Conclusions: Most domains of EF were not associated with youth's disinhibited eating. Significant associations may highlight the need to target specific cognitive processes, particularly behavioural disinhibition, decision making, and cognitive flexibility, in potential intervention strategies for children's disinhibited eating. K E Y W O R D Schild, disinhibited eating, executive functioning, obesity

Diet, Physical Activity, and Disinhibition in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: A UK Biobank Study

“…Similarly, overall diet quality is poorer in patients with ADHD [ 7 ], mania [ 8 ], and addictions [ 9 ] compared to unaffected individuals. Disinhibited eating, or the tendency to overeat in response to different stimuli including external food cues and stress, is associated with higher energy intake, higher BMI, and elevated obesity risk [ 10 , 11 ], as well as with more general indicators of behavioral disinhibition such as ADHD symptoms [ 12 , 13 ] and poor executive functioning task performance [ 14 , 15 ].…”

Delay of Gratification Predicts Eating in the Absence of Hunger in Preschool-Aged Children

“…While this study investigated and did not find an association between experimental tasks assessing EF and EAH, the authors acknowledged that their sample ( N = 29) may have been too small to find such effects (Pieper and Laugero, 2013 ). Indeed, a broader literature on EF abilities has shown that it is meaningfully related to eating behaviors in preschool- (Allom and Mullan, 2014 ; Levitan et al, 2015 ; Reimann et al, 2020 ) and school-aged (Riggs et al, 2010a , b ; Nederkoorn et al, 2015 ; Kelly et al, 2020 ) children (but see Hughes et al, 2015 ; Tan and Lumeng, 2018 ). A few studies have compared subdomains of EF (e.g., inhibitory control, updating), and suggest that they may be uniquely related to eating behavior (Allom and Mullan, 2014 ; Gettens and Gorin, 2017 ).…”

New Insights Into Causal Pathways Between the Pediatric Age-Related Physical Activity Decline and Loss of Control Eating: A Narrative Review and Proposed Conceptual Model

“…In particular, inhibitory control deficits (i.e., reduced ability to suppress or interrupt prepotent responses) can interfere with self-regulation processes, including the ability to modulate the types and amount of food consumed ( Liang et al, 2014 ) and are a specific facet of executive functioning that may be related to LOC eating. In fact, a recent study found that inhibitory control deficits, assessed with the stop-signal task, were the only executive functioning measure associated with caloric consumption during a laboratory test meal – an objective measure of LOC eating ( Kelly et al, 2020 ).…”