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Dietary restraint and cognitive performance in children

journal contribution
posted on 2016-01-22, 11:33 authored by Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, Claire J. Davison, Gemma WitcombGemma Witcomb
Adults who attempt to restrict their dietary intake also tend to perform worse on a range of cognitive tasks. However, the extent to which this finding generalises to children has remained unclear. Following studies involving adults, we asked 44 girls (mean ages 10.1 years) to complete a simple reaction-time task and the Tower of London task. This group was selected from a local community school in the East Midlands (UK). Dietary restraint was measured using a version of the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire that had been adapted for use by children. Our results indicate that children with high restraint scores have longer reaction times and they also tend to perform worse on the TOL task. Other aspects of our data also suggest the dietary restraint may be correlated negatively with a measure of academic ability. We discuss reasons why restraint and performance might be related causally and we conclude that this issue warrants further scrutiny.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

APPETITE

Volume

45

Issue

3

Pages

235 - 241 (7)

Citation

BRUNSTROM, J.M., DAVISON, C.J. and MITCHELL, G.L., 2005. Dietary restraint and cognitive performance in children. Appetite, 45(3), pp. 235-241.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2005

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

ISSN

0195-6663

Language

  • en