Discuss Attitudes Of Food And Or Eating Behaviour?

Discuss attitudes to food and/or eating behaviour
Everyone has varying opinions and behaviour towards the food, due to this it suggests that people’s attitude and behaviours to food must be affected by social factors. Otherwise they everyone would have similar attitudes to food if it was biologically determined.

Social learning theory emphasises the impact that observing others behaviour has an influence on ours. One way we might model our behaviour is through modelling our parents, through observation. Parental attitudes to food can affect the children because the parents are the ones that control the food thyat5 comes into the house and what the children will eat. This is supported by Brown and Ogden who found a correlation between parents and their children in terms or snack food intake, eating behaviour and body dissatisfaction. People are also influence by the media like magazines. MacIntyre et al found that the media has a major impact on what people eat and also their attitudes to certain foods. However they also state that many eating behaviours are limited by people’s personal circumstance like age, income and family circumstances. People take into account what they see in the media about healthy eating however they place this information into the context of their life for example they may not go onto some diets because they cannot afford the alternative foods.

The role of social learning has been supported by Birch and Fisher. They looked at the eating behaviours of daughters and mothers and found that the best predictors for a daughters eating behaviour were the mother’s dietary restraint and the perception of the risks of their daughters becoming overweight. Social learning focuses on how models can influence people’...

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... have shown that homosexuality is a risk factor in the development of disordered eating attitudes and behaviour, including body dissatisfaction and higher levels of dieting. These findings may be due to male gay subculture, which places and emphasis on the lean, muscular body ideal. This suggests that studies that focus just on women are limited and do not give a true representation of what effects eating attitudes and behaviours.

Attitudes to food and eating behaviour are influenced by many social factors. However the studies suffer from being unable to clearly show the difference by clinical, sub-clinical and non-clinical groups. They also don’t show how a non-clinical individual may become clinical through the influence of their attitudes and behaviours to food. For example how do you go from comfort eating to being a binge eater.