Adverse eating behavior and its association with obesity in Indian adolescents: Evidence from a nonmetropolitan city in India

Introduction: With the so-called modernization, the epidemiological and sociocultural context of adolescents in developing countries is rapidly changing and is affecting their eating behavior and dietary choices. The objective of our study is twofold. First, our study seeks to find whether there is a prevalence of the adverse eating behaviors among the adolescents. Second, our study seeks to examine whether the prevalence of the adverse eating behavior is related to obesity and quantifies their association of with body mass index (BMI) status. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional school-based study was conducted in 13–15-year-old adolescents from schools of Aligarh, India, with prevalidated study tools and standardized anthropometric measures. The Z-scores were found by the WHO recommended AnthroPlus. Results: The results indicate a high prevalence of different adverse eating behaviors. The dietary behavior was found to be poor in 19.3%, fair in 54.4%, and good in only 26.3% of the study population. The mean BMI for age Z-score was found to be 0.87 and 0.02 in poor and fair dietary behavior. The odds of being overweight and obese were high (1.82 [1.20–2.78]) in those with poor dietary behavior. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that more research and timely intervention in adverse eating behaviors are much needed in India before this widely neglected problem acquires even more alarming and gigantic proportions.