Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, Vol 55(1), Jan 2023, 14-22; doi:10.1037/cbs0000316
Despite the proposal that biased perceptions of food may be contributing to disordered eating, investigations of the link between disordered eating and perceptions of foods’ “healthiness/unhealthiness” are scarce. The present studies (N Study 1 = 371; N Study 2 = 298) explored this link in a community sample by exploring cognitive biases previously associated with disordered eating, namely, dichotomous thinking, negative evaluations of foods, and biases in knowledge. In Study 1, participants rated foods from extremely unhealthy to extremely healthy. In Study 2, participants completed a nutrition knowledge questionnaire assessing knowledge of the “healthiness/unhealthiness” of foods. Findings from Study 1 indicated that disordered eating was associated with an increased appraisal of foods as unhealthy, but not with dichotomous thinking applied to evaluations of foods’ healthiness. Findings from Study 2 revealed no association between disordered eating and knowledge of foods’ healthiness. Overall, our findings suggest that disordered eating is associated with increased evaluations of foods as unhealthy despite intact knowledge of foods’ nutritional content and their effects on health, and that the construct of dichotomous thinking is not sufficient for the understanding of maladaptive perceptions of foods’ healthiness in disordered eating. If replicated in clinical samples, our findings highlight the need for clinical interventions, including those targeting nutritional education, to focus on deconstructing negative views of foods as unhealthy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)