Appetite

 

Appetite is a process of food selection and consumption that is related to maintaining our body weight and therefore eating properly, eating well. It is an experience of eating, what, how, how much and where we eat, impacts our mood, our environment and our relationships with others and with ourselves.

Appetite can be measured in different ways:

  • The most traditional ways that dieticians often use are 24-hour recalls, food frequency questionnaires.

  • We can also measure appetite in laboratory situations, where under an experimental situation we give a preload of food (a snack) and after a while we bring a plate full of food,  to measure a person’s satiety, and see how much s/he ate after having had the snack.

  • Another less expensive and laborious way is to use questionnaires that measure appetite.

 

BEBQ

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The Baby Eating Behavior Questionnaire (BEBQ) measures appetitive traits in infants fed exclusively with milk (breast milk, formula or breast milk substitutes) from 0 to 6 months of age.

CEBQ

A questionnaire that measures eating behaviour in the form of appetitive traits  in children aged 3 to 13 years and how these are associated with being overweight or having obesity, is the “Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire” (CEBQ) created by Prof. Jane Wardle.

AEBQ

When I made the decision to do my PhD, as I had always worked on disordered eating behaviour, I came across the CEBQ and wrote to Prof. Jane Wardle, who would become my PhD supervisor. My work involved measuring appetitive traits in adults and analyzing their relationship with weight and weight control.

I developed the “Adult Eating Behavior Questionnaire” (AEBQ) which is a questionnaire that measures appetitive traits in adults aged 18 to 80, based on the CEBQ and which has also been validated in adolescents aged 11 to 18 years.

The AEBQ has been validated in different countries such as Australia, China, Bulgaria, and in bariatric patients. In Mexico, its validation is currently being reviewed for publication.

These questionnaires can be used to give weight control recommendations to persons with overweight and obesity, based on their appetitive profile.