Mobile Food Tracking Apps: Do They Provoke Disordered Eating Behavior? Results of a Longitudinal Study.

Abstract

Background: Some studies connect the popularity of food-tracking apps to an increase in restrictive eating and other disordered eating behaviors and find those apps harmful for psychological well-being, but there is a lack of empirical studies, especially of Russian samples.

Objective: To examine the connection between disordered eating symptoms, psychological well-being, and the use of a mobile food-tracking application.

Design: The participants were 26 women aged 18-30 (M = 21.96; SD = 3.33); 24 completed the study. During the pre-test, the participants completed the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (Van Strien et al., 1985), the Eating Attitude Test (Skugarevskii, 2007), the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Ma et al., 2023), the Situation Inventory of Body-Image Dysphoria (Baranskaia & Tataurova, 2011), and a socio-demographic survey with additional questions related to food tracking, weight, and disordered eating. The experimental group was then tasked with tracking their food consumption with a mobile app for a month. The test battery was completed again immediately after the experiment ended, and for a third time one month later.

Results: The comparative analysis showed a decrease in anxiety throughout the study, with a tendency-level increase in depressive symptoms by the end of the experiment. Contrary to expectations, emotional and external eating decreased during the experiment, while restrictive eating did not change. However, the risk of general disordered eating behavior increased one month after the experiment. The correlations between psychological well-being and eating behavior changed during the study. Immediately after the experiment, more correlations between eating behavior, body dissatisfaction, anxiety, and depression emerged, while at the later cutoff, correlations with depression and anxiety became insignificant.

Conclusion: The study had mixed results, contradicting some previous research. Both emotional and external eating decreased along with anxiety levels; however, general disordered eating symptoms increased after food tracking.