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. 2024 Jan 2;21(1):1.
doi: 10.1186/s12966-023-01551-w.

The role of psychosocial well-being and emotion-driven impulsiveness in food choices of European adolescents

Stefanie Do  1   2 , Vanessa Didelez  3   2 , Claudia Börnhorst  3 , Juul M J Coumans  4 , Lucia A Reisch  5 , Unna N Danner  6 , Paola Russo  7 , Toomas Veidebaum  8 , Michael Tornaritis  9 , Dénes Molnár  10 , Monica Hunsberger  11 , Stefaan De Henauw  12 , Luis A Moreno  13 , Wolfgang Ahrens  2 , Antje Hebestreit  14 ; IDEFICS/I.Family consortia
Affiliations

The role of psychosocial well-being and emotion-driven impulsiveness in food choices of European adolescents

Stefanie Do et al. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. .

Abstract

Background: It is unclear whether a hypothetical intervention targeting either psychosocial well-being or emotion-driven impulsiveness is more effective in reducing unhealthy food choices. Therefore, we aimed to compare the (separate) causal effects of psychosocial well-being and emotion-driven impulsiveness on European adolescents' sweet and fat propensity.

Methods: We included 2,065 participants of the IDEFICS/I.Family cohort (mean age: 13.4) providing self-reported data on sweet propensity (score range: 0 to 68.4), fat propensity (range: 0 to 72.6), emotion-driven impulsiveness using the UPPS-P negative urgency subscale, and psychosocial well-being using the KINDLR Questionnaire. We estimated, separately, the average causal effects of psychosocial well-being and emotion-driven impulsiveness on sweet and fat propensity applying a semi-parametric doubly robust method (targeted maximum likelihood estimation). Further, we investigated a potential indirect effect of psychosocial well-being on sweet and fat propensity mediated via emotion-driven impulsiveness using a causal mediation analysis.

Results: If all adolescents, hypothetically, had high levels of psychosocial well-being, compared to low levels, we estimated a decrease in average sweet propensity by 1.43 [95%-confidence interval: 0.25 to 2.61]. A smaller effect was estimated for fat propensity. Similarly, if all adolescents had high levels of emotion-driven impulsiveness, compared to low levels, average sweet propensity would be decreased by 2.07 [0.87 to 3.26] and average fat propensity by 1.85 [0.81 to 2.88]. The indirect effect of psychosocial well-being via emotion-driven impulsiveness was 0.61 [0.24 to 1.09] for average sweet propensity and 0.55 [0.13 to 0.86] for average fat propensity.

Conclusions: An intervention targeting emotion-driven impulsiveness, compared to psychosocial well-being, would be marginally more effective in reducing sweet and fat propensity in adolescents.

Keywords: Adolescents; Causal inference; Causal mediation; Food preferences; I.Family study; Impulsivity; Mental health.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare no conflict of interest.

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