Obese youngsters do not identify themselves with fatty food and sedentariness

A study investigating whether obese youngsters implicitly identify with fat food and sedentariness has revealed no such association, contrary to the researchers' hypotheses.Do youngsters with obesity differ from non-obese children in their attitudes toward exercise and food? It is thought that youngsters with obesity may have more positive attitudes towards fatty foods and sedentariness than children without obesity.Craeynest et al. sought to answer this question by comparing the implicit attitudes of 39 children and adolescents with severe obesity (mean adjusted body mass index [ABMI] 166.70%; 16 boys; mean age 14.12 years) to 39 controls (ABMI 103.44%; 17 boys; mean age 14.0 years).All participants carried out two Implicit Association Tasks: one relating to physical activity and one to food. Participants were then asked to rate the physical activity and food target concepts on two graphic scales to assess the explicit attitudes.The results revealed that youngsters with and without obesity had similar explicit attitudes towards both physical activity and food, with both groups being neutral towards non-fat food and mildly positive towards sedentariness, exercise and fatty food. A striking finding was that both obese and non-obese children reported a preference for sedentariness and fatty food, a finding that the authors affirmed is not in line with our 'societal desirability hypothesis'. To that end they stated that "it is possible that children are less sensitive for societal views than we had expected, for that their fat food preference reflects the evolutionary benefit of fat foods."However, the results also revealed a marked group difference on the implicit identification with food. Only the non-obese controls identified themselves more with non-fat food than with fat food; youngsters with obesity did not implicitly identify themselves more with fatty food than with non-fat food. Furthermore, contrary to their hypothesis that youngsters with obesity would implicitly identify themselves more with sedentariness than with exercising, no such effect was found.Many of the results of this study were contrary to the authors' hypotheses. They note that the finding that the obesity group does not dissociate with fat could be attributed to a negative self-esteem that is often found in children with obesity. They propose that repeating the experiment in a non-clinical group of children with obesity (or overweight) may provide an interesting data set for comparison to the current results.Reference...