(PS8-B37) Examining Food Insecurity and Loss of Control Eating: The Mediating Role of Distress and Any-reason Restraint

Purpose: Prior research suggests that individuals experiencing food insecurity (FI; limited or uncertain access to adequate, nutritious food) are highly susceptible to developing disordered eating habits (e.g.., loss of control eating; LOCE), binge eating disorder and obesity. Given the presence of chronic stress of uncertainty about next meals, FI is also predictive of anxiety and depression. In an attempt to cope with this chronic stressor, food insecure individuals may restrict food intake unrelated to body image reasons (e.g., to make available food last longer), however cognitive and physiological mechanisms of restraint appear to result in thought rebound and diminished control, and increased hunger and drive to eat respectively. This is the first known study to examine the shared mechanisms of distress and restraint to explain the relationship between FI and LOCE.

Procedure: Psychology undergraduate students (N = 316; 74.4% freshman; 68.4% White; 76.9% female) ages 17-37 at a southern university filled out questionnaires on Qualtrics pertaining to distress (PHQ-9), loss of control control eating (Loss of Control Eating Scale), and any-reason restraint (AR; Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire-Restraint subscale, e.g., restrained eating not necessarily driven by weight and shape concerns). Structural Equation Modeling in R was used to examine whether distress and any-reason restraint simultaneously mediated the relationship between food insecurity and loss of control eating.

Results: The SEM model with distress and AR as latent variables mediating the FI - LOCE relationship reflected good fit to the data (CFI = 0.992, TLI = 0.978, RMSEA = 0.029, SRMR = 0.034). While distress mediated the relationship between FI and LOCE (indirect effect B = .08, p< .001), the indirect effect of AR (B=0.02) was nonsignificant, although trending towards significance with p = .06.. Both distress (B= .36, p< .001) and AR (B=.17, p =.02 ) had significant direct effects on LOCE, whereas the direct effect of FI was negligible and nonsignificant (B = .007, p = .88)

 


Conclusion: Distress, specifically depression appears to be the mechanism that drives loss of control eating among food insecure individuals.