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The Development of Appetite: Tracking and Age-Related Differences in Appetitive Traits in Childhood

Elena Jansen1, Gita Thapaliya1, Jennifer Beauchemin2

  • 1Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21287, USA.

Nutrients
|March 29, 2023
PubMed

Insights

Childhood appetitive traits, like emotional overeating, change with age. These eating behaviors generally track consistently throughout childhood, offering insights into obesity risk.

Area of Science:

  • Child Psychology
  • Behavioral Science
  • Nutritional Science

Background:

  • Appetitive traits influence body weight and obesity risk.
  • Understanding early life development of these traits is crucial for interventions.
  • The RESONANCE cohort provides a dataset to study childhood eating behaviors.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate age-related changes in children's appetitive traits.
  • To examine the tracking of these traits throughout childhood.
  • To inform potential strategies for managing obesity risk.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) completed by parents.
  • Analyzed data from 335 children for age correlations.
  • Assessed longitudinal tracking and age differences in 127 children using paired t-tests and correlations.

Main Results:

  • Satiety responsiveness, slowness in eating, emotional undereating, and desire to drink decreased with age.
  • Emotional overeating significantly increased with age (p = 0.005).
  • Food fussiness showed a quadratic relationship with age, and all traits demonstrated moderate to high tracking (r = 0.533 to 0.760).

Conclusions:

  • Appetitive traits exhibit significant age-related trajectories in childhood.
  • Emotional overeating appears to increase, while food avoidance traits decrease with age.
  • These findings highlight the stability of appetitive traits and their evolving nature during development.

Keywords:
age-related differencesappetitechilddevelopmenttracking

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