Understanding the Role of Hunger in Dietary Cognition and the Food Insecurity-Obesity Paradox

Abstract

Food insecurity (FI) can be defined as limited or uncertain access to food of adequate nutritional quantity or quality and is often assumed to cause increased hunger levels. FI is associated with an increased risk of obesity in women in high income countries. In recent years, the prevalence of FI has increased in higher income countries where diet-related disease burden remains a significant public health challenge. Therefore, it is important to characterise the experience of hunger in FI and explore the potential effects that hunger has on the psychological processing of food to better predict the downstream effects on eating behaviour. I first report the results of a descriptive ecological momentary assessment study (EMA) that investigated the experiences of hunger across the day in two groups of women: one experiencing food security (FS) and one FI (Chapter 2). There was no difference between groups in average hunger and hunger variability within a day. However, in the FI group, there was greater variation in daily average hunger and within-day hunger variability between days. I then present two pieces of research focusing on how acute hunger impacts food-related cognition, as these mechanisms may underpin decision-making processes during food selection. In Chapter 3, I report two conceptual replications of a well-cited paper, which found that participants experienced greater attentional capture by food cues when hungry than when they were sated. However, the effect was not replicated. In Chapter 4, I explore the impact of hunger on the memory of food-related information in two studies, which comprised an image recognition and a price recall task. Hunger did not impact the memory of food-related stimuli in either study. Finally, I discuss the broader implications of my findings and consider future research directions (Chapter 5).