Obesity related eating behaviour patterns in Swedish preschool children and association with age, gender, relative weight and parental weight - factorial validation of the Children's Eating Behaviour Questionnaire

One of the strongest risk factors for childhood obesity is parental overweight and obesity [1, 2]. To prevent a further increase of obesity in children, there is an urgent need for evidence-based interventions, targeting families in different risk groups [3, 4]. Previous studies have suggested that weight problems in children can, to some extent, be explained by individual differences in eating style [5, 6]. It would be important to early identify behavioural eating traits that promote overeating and obesity in order to address this in multifaceted interventions directed to parents [7].

Eating behaviour patterns develop already in infancy, as children's genetic predispositions, natural food responses and taste preferences are influenced by the exposure to foods and parental feeding practices [8]. The regulation of energy intake differs between children already in the preschool period, and the individual differences in self-regulation and eating behaviours have been associated with heritability, differences in child-feeding practices and with children's adiposity [8–11].

Specific eating behaviours that have been associated with obesity include under-responsiveness to internal satiety cues (low satiety responsiveness, high speed of eating) and over-responsiveness to external food cues such as taste, smell, availability and emotions (high enjoyment of food, food responsiveness and emotional overeating) [5, 12], whereas the findings regarding the relationships between fussy eating and relative weight in children have been conflicting [9, 13, 14].

Several psychometric instruments have been developed for the purpose of detecting individual differences in eating behaviours in children, such as the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) and the Children's Eating Behaviour Inventory [15, 16]. One of the most comprehensive is the Children's Eating Behaviour Questionnaire, CEBQ, developed and validated in the UK and applicable to preschool children [17, 18]. The CEBQ is a multi-dimensional, parent-reported questionnaire measuring children's eating behaviour related to obesity risk. The CEBQ consists of 35 items originally derived from interviews with parents about their children's eating behaviour and the literature on the subject. The items cover eight dimensions of eating style: 'enjoyment of food' (EF), 'food responsiveness' (FR), 'emotional overeating' (EOE), 'desire to drink' (DD), 'satiety responsiveness' (SR), 'slowness in eating' (SE), 'emotional undereating' (EUE) and 'food fussiness' (FF). The CEBQ has been shown to have good internal consistency, adequate test-retest reliability and construct validity [17, 18].

The CEBQ subscales are categorized in 'food approach' (EF, FR, EOE, DD) and 'food avoidant' sub-scales (SR, SE, EUE, FF), where the 'food approach' behaviours have been positively associated and the 'food avoidant' scales negatively associated with children's relative weight [17, 19–22]. The 'enjoyment of food' scale represents a general interest in food and the 'food responsiveness' scale is intended to measure eating in response to external food cues. These behaviours have been seen to become more apparent as children get older [18, 23]. The scale 'desire to drink' was developed in order to detect increased desire to have drinks, particularly sugar-sweetened drinks and has been related to a liking for consuming sweetened drinks [18, 24]. 'Satiety responsiveness' reflects the ability to regulate the amount of food that is eaten according to internal satiety cues. This ability has been seen to be high in infants and to decrease with age [18, 19, 22, 23]. The scale 'slowness in eating' measures the speed of eating during the course of a meal and reflects a gradually reduced interest in a meal. This behaviour has been seen to decrease with age, that is older children eat faster than younger children [18, 23]. 'Food fussiness' reflects a lack of interest in food and unwillingness to try new foods (food neophobia), leading to an inadequate variety of foods [25], and generally this behaviour decreases with age after the preschool period [23, 26]. Finally, the scales 'emotional overeating' and 'emotional undereating' are characterized by either increased or decreased eating in response to negative emotions, such as anger and anxiety.

CEBQ has been successfully used in several child populations to measure associations between eating behaviours and children's relative weight (BMI SDS or BMI z-score): in the UK (age 3-8 years), the Netherlands (age 6-7 years), Portugal (age 3-13 years) and Canada (age 4-5 years) [18–20, 22]. The instrument has also been used in other studies, e.g. to compare appetite preferences in children of lean and obese parents, to study continuity and stability in children's eating behaviour during childhood and relationships between temperament and eating behaviours in young children [23, 27, 28]. The results of these studies support the use of CEBQ in obesity related research.

Eating behaviours of young children are addressed in the Swedish Early STOPP obesity prevention intervention, targeting preschool children 1-6 years of age at high risk of developing obesity [29]. The CEBQ questionnaire is one of several instruments measuring the effectiveness of the Early STOPP intervention, a 5 year intervention starting when the children are 1 years old. However, the CEBQ questionnaire has not previously been validated in a Swedish population; neither has it been validated for children under the age of 2. The primary aim of this study was therefore to examine the factor structure and the reliability of the Swedish version of the CEBQ questionnaire in a population of preschool children corresponding to a cross-section of the Early STOPP study population. The secondary aim was to examine the associations between eating behaviours and child age, gender and relative weight and parental weight and to specifically explore the effect of including children under 2 years of age on the CEBQ factor structure and its variation with age.

This is the first study to use the CEBQ instrument in a preschool sample including children as young as 1 year old, offering unique opportunities to measure eating behaviours very early in life and to analyse their variation with age in the age bracket 1-6 years. We have shown that the Swedish version of the CEBQ has good psychometric properties in terms of factor structure, internal reliability and correlations between subscales, similar to the original UK study and two other validation studies on Dutch and Portuguese samples [18, 19, 22].

The factor analysis showed that a seven factor structure was the best solution in our sample, combining two of the 'food-approach' scales, 'emotional overeating' and 'food responsiveness' into one ('overeating'), confirming the factor structure of the previous Dutch study [19]. Several items that originally belonged to the 'food responsiveness' scale had loadings above 0.4 on both the 'overeating' and 'food responsiveness' scales, but these were retained on the 'overeating' scale, optimizing the internal reliability. The single item that loaded onto a separate factor was disregarded since one item is not sufficient to describe a dimension of eating behaviour. We chose to use the resulting seven-factor structure in the statistical analyses, rather than the original structure, since it fitted our sample the best and comparisons with other validation studies were still applicable. However, using the original structure would have been an option as the internal reliability was only marginally lower.

Since this study included children as young as 1 year old up to 6 years old, we found age effects for several of the scales that interestingly differed for some of the eating behaviours compared to previous studies. The 'food-approach' behaviours 'overeating' and 'enjoyment of food' was less present in the older preschool children, whereas these scales previously have been seen to increase with age from 2-3 years of age [18, 23]. We also observed that 'food fussiness' was more present in older children, whereas this eating behaviour did not vary by age in the original study (study population 3-9 years) and in general is thought to decrease with age after the preschool period [18, 23]. As previous studies did not include children as young as 1 year old this may explain our results. Food neophobia, which is described as the reluctance to eat new food, normally starts to develop in children from the age of 18 months, reaches a peak between 2 and 6 years of age and then gradually decreases with age (and with repeated food exposures) [26, 32, 33]. Food neophobia is measured as part of the CEBQ scale 'food fussiness', which has been shown to be negatively correlated with both 'enjoyment of food' and 'food responsiveness' [18, 19]. It would be logical that these eating behaviours have opposite patterns also in variation with age. Since our study did not include school-age children, we suggest that the youngest children might have a lower neophobic behaviour as well as the highest scores for 'enjoyment of food'. A higher presence of 'overeating' in younger children may seem somewhat surprising though, since in theory children's ability to self-regulate how much to eat normally decreases with age [8]. However, the 'overeating' scores were quite low for all children in our sample, and thus the identified difference with regard to age may be of less importance. Similar to previous findings, we could report that the behaviour 'emotional undereating' decreased with age, implying that as children grow older the negative effect of emotions, such as anger and tiredness, on how much the children eat gradually diminishes.

Boys and girls did not differ in eating behaviours, which was comparable with the original study that only saw minimal gender differences [18]. In older (adolescent) children, it has been reported that boys and girls have different eating styles, however it is not known at what age these differences start to develop [34].

Our study could not identify any associations between eating behaviours and the children's relative weight (BMI SDS) - in contrast to previous research [18–20, 22]. A plausible explanation is a lack of power, our sample was quite small and weight homogeneous. Other studies analysing associations between relative weight and eating behaviours have had a reasonable share of overweight/obese children in their study samples [19–22, 35]. On the other hand we found a significantly higher relative weight among children having one obese or two overweight parents. This result is not surprising since parental weight has been identified as a dominating risk factor for obesity in children and weight is highly heritable [1, 2, 36, 37], but it is in contrast to the previous CEBQ studies [18–20, 22]. However, the associations between eating behaviours and the children's relative weight have not been controlled for parental weight in several of the previous studies [19, 20, 22].

Interestingly, the parents' BMI correlated with certain eating behaviours. Mothers with higher BMI had children with lower scores for the 'food avoidant' scales 'emotional under-eating' and 'food fussiness' and fathers with higher BMI had children showing higher 'overeating' scores. This confirms previous research on the effect of parental weight on children's eating behaviours. In one study, comparing eating behaviours in preschool children to lean and obese parents, children with obese parents showed higher emotional overeating and food responsiveness [28]. The relation between maternal BMI and their sons emotional eating has been seen to be mediated by maternal eating behaviour in a German population of preschool children [38]. There are additional evidence for associations between different aspects of parental behaviour (parents' own eating behaviours, parental feeding practises and parenting style) and children's eating behaviours [13, 39]. The identified association between parental and child relative weight could as suggested above partly be explained by genetic factors where one possible pathway is through inherited appetitive traits, which also could explain our associations between parental relative weight and children's eating behaviours [10]. In measuring children's eating behaviours it thus appears to be important to take into account both familial predisposition to obesity as well as parental behavioural influence [7].

This study has some limitations that should be acknowledged. The parents' weight and height were self-reported. Self-reports are known to underestimate BMI, especially among females, but there are epidemiological studies showing that self-reported weight and height in adults has been reliable for recognizing associations [1]. The sample of children for which relative weight was available was small and weight homogeneous, with a negative impact on the possibility to detect associations between eating behaviours and child weight. The external validity may also be limited to a high SES population, due to a large share of parents with high educational level in our sample. Finally, regarding the applicability of the questionnaire for children under 2 years of age, there is a possibility that parents with younger children may have found some items less relevant when describing their child's eating behaviour, with a potential effect on their responses. We chose to use the CEBQ even though it was originally developed and validated on children above 2 years old since we found it to be the most suitable tool available [18]. In addition, approval to use the questionnaire and confirmation that it could be applicable for children under 2 years of age was obtained from the developer of the instrument (prof. Wardle). Our study also confirmed that the factor structure of the CEBQ was unaffected by the youngest children. However, as this study has been completed the authors have become aware that a CEBQ version for toddlers is being developed by the same group (unpublished).

In this study the eating behaviours were assessed among young children only at one occasion. However, the outcome in terms of overweight can only be detected in longitudinal studies, where eating behaviours are measured repeatedly. Eating behaviours would also be an applicable outcome in interventional studies, where parents' knowledge about children's eating behaviours and parents' feeding practices can be targeted. Future research will focus on longitudinal associations between parental feeding behaviour and child eating behaviours in groups with different predisposition to obesity.

Our study supports the use of the CEBQ as a psychometric instrument for assessing children's eating behaviour in Swedish children aged 1-6 years. The pattern of eating behaviours of children 1 year old seems to differ compared to that of older preschool children. Children's relative weight is not associated with eating behaviours when controlling for parental weight. Measuring obesity related eating behaviours in longitudinal and interventional studies, starting at an early age and in the context of the family environment, offers opportunities for studying causal effects of eating behaviours in the development of obesity in children.