The reward-based eating drive scale: a self-report index of reward-based eating

Elissa S Epel, A Janet Tomiyama, Ashley E Mason, Barbara A Laraia, William Hartman, Karen Ready, Michael Acree, Tanja C Adam, Sachiko St Jeor, David Kessler, Elissa S Epel, A Janet Tomiyama, Ashley E Mason, Barbara A Laraia, William Hartman, Karen Ready, Michael Acree, Tanja C Adam, Sachiko St Jeor, David Kessler

Abstract

Why are some individuals more vulnerable to persistent weight gain and obesity than are others? Some obese individuals report factors that drive overeating, including lack of control, lack of satiation, and preoccupation with food, which may stem from reward-related neural circuitry. These are normative and common symptoms and not the sole focus of any existing measures. Many eating scales capture these common behaviors, but are confounded with aspects of dysregulated eating such as binge eating or emotional overeating. Across five studies, we developed items that capture this reward-based eating drive (RED). Study 1 developed the items in lean to obese individuals (n = 327) and examined changes in weight over eight years. In Study 2, the scale was further developed and expert raters evaluated the set of items. Study 3 tested psychometric properties of the final 9 items in 400 participants. Study 4 examined psychometric properties and race invariance (n = 80 women). Study 5 examined psychometric properties and age/gender invariance (n = 381). Results showed that RED scores correlated with BMI and predicted earlier onset of obesity, greater weight fluctuations, and greater overall weight gain over eight years. Expert ratings of RED scale items indicated that the items reflected characteristics of reward-based eating. The RED scale evidenced high internal consistency and invariance across demographic factors. The RED scale, designed to tap vulnerability to reward-based eating behavior, appears to be a useful brief tool for identifying those at higher risk of weight gain over time. Given the heterogeneity of obesity, unique brief profiling of the reward-based aspect of obesity using a self-report instrument such as the RED scale may be critical for customizing effective treatments in the general population.

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: At the time of original submission, WH was working for Weight Management Program of San Francisco, Inc. At the time of original submission, KIR was working for Weight Management Program of San Francisco, Inc. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

References

    1. Wadden TA, Brownell KD, Foster GD (2002) Obesity: responding to the global epidemic. J Consult Clin Psychol 70: 510–525.
    1. van Dillen SM, van Binsbergen JJ, Koelen MA, Hiddink GJ (2013) Nutrition and physical activity guidance practices in general practice: a critical review. Patient education and counseling 90: 155–169.
    1. Mann T, Tomiyama AJ, Westling E, Lew A-M, Samuels B, et al. (2007) Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer. American Psychologist 62: 220–233.
    1. Ebrahim S, Taylor F, Ward K, Beswick A, Burke M, et al. (2011) Multiple risk factor interventions for primary prevention of coronary heart disease. Cochrane Database Syst Rev: CD001561.
    1. Drewnowski A, Darmon N (2005) The economics of obesity: dietary energy density and energy cost. Am J Clin Nutr 82: 265S–273S.
    1. Kessler DA (2010) The end of overeating: Taking control of the insatiable American appetite: Rodale.
    1. Moss M (2013) Salt, sugar, fat: How the food giants hooked us: Random House.
    1. Corsica JA, Pelchat ML (2010) Food addiction: true or false? Current opinion in gastroenterology 26: 165–169.
    1. Davis C, Curtis C, Levitan RD, Carter JC, Kaplan AS, et al. (2011) Evidence that ‘food addiction’ is a valid phenotype of obesity. Appetite 57: 711–717.
    1. Blair SN (2009) Physical inactivity: the biggest public health problem of the 21st century. Br J Sports Med 43: 1–2.
    1. Pelchat ML (2009) Food addiction in humans. The Journal of nutrition 139: 620–622.
    1. Franklin TR, Acton PD, Maldjian JA, Gray JD, Croft JR, et al. (2002) Decreased gray matter concentration in the insular, orbitofrontal, cingulate, and temporal cortices of cocaine patients. Biological psychiatry 51: 134–142.
    1. Daubenmier J, Lustig RH, Hecht FM, Kristeller J, Woolley J, et al. (2014) A new biomarker of hedonic eating? A preliminary investigation of cortisol and nausea responses to acute opioid blockade. Appetite 74: 92–100.
    1. Volkow N, Wang G, Fowler J, Tomasi D, Baler R (2012) Food and drug reward: overlapping circuits in human obesity and addiction. Brain Imaging in Behavioral Neuroscience: Springer. 1–24.
    1. Volkow N, Wang GJ, Tomasi D, Baler R (2013) Obesity and addiction: neurobiological overlaps. obesity reviews 14: 2–18.
    1. Volkow ND, Wang G-J, Baler RD (2011) Reward, dopamine and the control of food intake: implications for obesity. Trends in cognitive sciences 15: 37–46.
    1. Pfefferbaum A, Lim KO, Zipursky RB, Mathalon DH, Rosenbloom MJ, et al. (1992) Brain gray and white matter volume loss accelerates with aging in chronic alcoholics: a quantitative MRI study. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 16: 1078–1089.
    1. Chiolero A, Faeh D, Paccaud F, Cornuz J (2008) Consequences of smoking for body weight, body fat distribution, and insulin resistance. Am J Clin Nutr 87: 801–809.
    1. Church TS, Cheng YJ, Earnest CP, Barlow CE, Gibbons LW, et al. (2004) Exercise capacity and body composition as predictors of mortality among men with diabetes. Diabetes Care 27: 83–88.
    1. Cappelleri JC, Bushmakin AG, Gerber RA, Leidy NK, Sexton CC, et al. (2009) Evaluating the Power of Food Scale in obese subjects and a general sample of individuals: development and measurement properties. International Journal of Obesity 33: 913–922.
    1. Lowe MR, Butryn ML, Didie ER, Annunziato RA, Thomas JG, et al. (2009) The Power of Food Scale. A new measure of the psychological influence of the food environment. Appetite 53: 114–118.
    1. Stunkard A, Messick S (1985) The three factor eating questionnaire to measure dietary restraint, disinhibition and hunger. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 29: 71–83.
    1. Van Strien T, Frijters JE, Bergers G, Defares PB (1986) The Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) for assessment of restrained, emotional, and external eating behavior. International Journal of Eating Disorders 5: 295–315.
    1. Gormally J, Black S, Daston S, Rardin D (1982) The assessment of binge eating severity among obese persons. Addictive behaviors 7: 47–55.
    1. Corsica JA, Spring BJ (2008) Carbohydrate craving: a double-blind, placebo-controlled test of the self-medication hypothesis. Eating Behaviors 9: 447–454.
    1. Gearhardt AN, Yokum S, Orr PT, Stice E, Corbin WR, et al. (2011) Neural correlates of food addiction. Archives of General Psychiatry 68: 808–816.
    1. Stice E, Yokum S, Blum K, Bohon C (2010) Weight gain is associated with reduced striatal response to palatable food. The Journal of Neuroscience 30: 13105–13109.
    1. Yokum S, Ng J, Stice E (2012) Relation of regional gray and white matter volumes to current BMI and future increases in BMI: a prospective MRI study. International Journal of Obesity 36: 656–664.
    1. Luders E, Toga AW, Lepore N, Gaser C (2009) The underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation: larger hippocampal and frontal volumes of gray matter. Neuroimage 45: 672–678.
    1. Maguire EA, Woollett K, Spiers HJ (2006) London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus 16: 1091–1101.
    1. Gaser C, Schlaug G (2003) Brain structures differ between musicians and non-musicians. The Journal of Neuroscience 23: 9240–9245.
    1. Sim ME, Lyoo IK, Streeter CC, Covell J, Sarid-Segal O, et al. (2007) Cerebellar gray matter volume correlates with duration of cocaine use in cocaine-dependent subjects. Neuropsychopharmacology 32: 2229–2237.
    1. Pfefferbaum A, Sullivan EV, Rosenbloom MJ, Mathalon DH, Lim KO (1998) A controlled study of cortical gray matter and ventricular changes in alcoholic men over a 5-year interval. Archives of General Psychiatry 55: 905–912.
    1. Zipursky RB, Lim KO, Sullivan EV, Brown BW, Pfefferbaum A (1992) Widespread cerebral gray matter volume deficits in schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry 49: 195.
    1. Gearhardt AN, Corbin WR, Brownell KD (2009) Food addiction: an examination of the diagnostic criteria for dependence. Journal of addiction medicine 3: 1–7.
    1. Ahmed SH, Avena NM, Berridge KC, Gearhardt AN, Guillem K (2013) Food addiction. Neuroscience in the 21st Century: Springer. 2833–2857.
    1. Czernichow S, Kengne AP, Stamatakis E, Hamer M, Batty GD (2011) Body mass index, waist circumference and waist-hip ratio: which is the better discriminator of cardiovascular disease mortality risk?: evidence from an individual-participant meta-analysis of 82 864 participants from nine cohort studies. Obes Rev 12: 680–687.
    1. Flint AJ, Gearhardt AN, Corbin WR, Brownell KD, Field AE, et al. (2014) Food addiction scale measurement in 2 cohorts of middle-aged and older women. The American journal of clinical nutrition: ajcn. 068965.
    1. Fontaine KR, Faith MS, Allison DB, Cheskin LJ (1998) Body weight and health care among women in the general population. Arch Fam Med 7: 381–384.
    1. Fontaine KR, Heo M, Allison DB (2001) Body weight and cancer screening among women. Journal of Womens Health & Gender-Based Medicine 10: 463–470.
    1. Cappelleri JC, Gerber RA (2003) Exploratory factor analysis. Encyclopedia of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, 2nd revised and expanded edition Marcel Dekker Inc: New York, NY: 343–348.
    1. Velicer WF, Eaton CA, Fava JL (2000) Construct explication through factor or component analysis: A review and evaluation of alternative procedures for determining the number of factors or components. Problems and solutions in human assessment: Springer. 41–71.
    1. Ender P (2006) fapara: Command to compute parallel analysis in factor analysis. UCLA: Statistical Consulting Group.
    1. Fontaine KR, Redden DT, Wang C, Westfall AO, Allison DB (2003) Years of life lost due to obesity. JAMA: the journal of the American Medical Association 289: 187–193.
    1. Burhmester M, Kwant T, Gosling SG (2011) Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science 6: 3–5.
    1. Kittur A, Chi E, Suh B (2008) Crowdsourcing User Studies With Mechanical Turk. New York: ACM Press.
    1. Gearhardt A, Roberto CA, Seamans MJ, Corbin WR, Brownell KD (2013) Preliminary Validation of the Yale Food Addiction Scale for Children. Eating Behaviors.
    1. NHLBI Growth and Health Study Research Group (1992) Obesity and cardiovascular disease risk factors in black and white girls: the NHLBI Growth and Health Study. American journal of public health 82: 1613–1620.
    1. Brown TA (2012) Confirmatory factor analysis for applied research: Guilford Press.
    1. Hu Lt, Bentler PM (1999) Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal 6: 1–55.
    1. Gregorich SE (2006) Do self-report instruments allow meaningful comparisons across diverse population groups? Testing measurement invariance using the confirmatory factor analysis framework. Medical care 44: S78–94.
    1. Dimsdale JE (2008) Psychological stress and cardiovascular disease. J Am Coll Cardiol 51: 1237–1246.
    1. Cohen S, Janicki-Deverts D, Miller GE (2007) Psychological stress and disease. JAMA 298: 1685–1687.
    1. Fogelholm M (2010) Physical activity, fitness and fatness: relations to mortality, morbidity and disease risk factors. A systematic review. Obes Rev 11: 202–221.
    1. Braveman PA, Cubbin C, Egerter S, Chideya S, Marchi KS, et al. (2005) Socioeconomic status in health research: one size does not fit all. JAMA 294: 2879–2888.
    1. Brown I (2006) Nurses’ attitudes towards adult patients who are obese: literature review. J Adv Nurs 53: 221–232.
    1. Field AE, Byers T, Hunter DJ, Laird NM, Manson JE, et al. (1999) Weight cycling, weight gain, and risk of hypertension in women. Am J Epidemiol 150: 573–579.
    1. Nijs IM, Franken IH, Muris P (2007) The modified Trait and State Food-Cravings Questionnaires: development and validation of a general index of food craving. Appetite 49: 38–46.
    1. Carr KA, Daniel TO, Lin H, Epstein LH (2011) Reinforcement pathology and obesity. Curr Drug Abuse Rev 4: 190–196.
    1. Curioni C, Andre C, Veras R (2006) Weight reduction for primary prevention of stroke in adults with overweight or obesity. Cochrane Database Syst Rev: CD006062.

Source: PubMed

Спонсоры и соавторы

Заболевания

Медикаментозные вмешательства

Подписаться