NUTRITION AND BEHAVIOR IN ADOLESCENT GIRLS

Adolescent girls are increasingly concerned with weight and thinness. When attempting to lose weight, girls often employ unhealthy practices such as fad diets or purging behaviors including induced vomiting and laxative use rather than adhering to a balanced diet and engaging in appropriate amounts of physical activity. Eating problems such as dieting, preoccupation with weight, and bingeing emerge during the adolescent years and have been associated with several serious health problems over and above frank eating disorders. The specific goals of this proposal are: (1) to investigate the development of eating behaviors during adolescence and young adulthood and the continuum of behaviors that constitute unhealthy patterns of eating, and to identify the specific patterns of behavior that lead to and result from engaging in unhealthy behaviors during adolescence or young adulthood; (b) to investigate the interrelationship of depression with eating disorders as well as the association of depressive affect and eating behaviors and problems in order to determine if common developmental processes apply across pathologies; and (c) to investigate whether, to what extent, and how relations in the family and maternal psychopathology are associated with the development of disturbed eating or clinical disorders. These goals will be achieved through the investigation of a sample of 238 young women (between the ages of 21 and 23) who have been followed longitudinally by this group of researchers for 8 years. The patterns of eating behaviors will be coded from interviews conducted with each young woman in the past year. This information will be analyzed in conjunction with questionnaire data, also obtained from these women, on family relationships, problem behaviors, psychological well-being, and eating attitudes. Comparisons to earlier reports of behaviors and functioning in these domains is also planned in order to assess the developmental processes associated with unhealthy and healthy behaviors. This is perhaps the only prospective, longitudinal investigation of eating behaviors and psychological well-being which has traversed the adolescent decade.