Relationship Among Obesity Awareness, Emotional Eating, and Obesity in Middle School Children

Abstract

The ratio of childhood obesity has doubled in the last 30 years (4). The ratio of obese children and adolescents in the US was 16.9% (5). According to the investigation report on monitoring the growth of school children (6-10-year-old age group) project in Turkey by the General Directorate of Basic Health Services of the Turkish Ministry of Health (6) 8.5% of children were obese and the ratios of overweight children in cities and rural areas were 16.3% and 11.9%, respectively. There is a global increase in the prevalence of obesity and being overweight in children and adolescents. Researchers have the important task to investigate the causes of obesity such as sedentarism, emotional eating, parents, and children’s awareness about obesity. Demir and Bektas (7) reported that eating behaviors and parental feeding styles affect the occurrence of obesity in childhood. Parents may influence their children’s eating behaviors and result in high levels of disinhibited emotional eating in early adolescents (8). There are only a small number of studies that investigate the relationship between emotional eating and obesity in children (9,10).