Abstract
Social context, specifically within the family, influences adolescent eating behaviours and
thus their health. Little is known about the specific mechanisms underlying the effects of
parental feeding practices on eating. We explored relationships between parental feeding
practices and adolescent eating habits and brain activity in response to viewing food
images. Fifty- seven adolescents (15 with type 2 diabetes mellitus, 21 obese and 21 healthy
weight controls) underwent fMRI scanning whilst viewing images of food or matched control
images. Participants completed the Kids Child Feeding Questionnaire, the Childrens’ Dutch
Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) and took part in an observed meal. Parents completed
the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionniare and the DEBQ. We were particularly
interested in brain activity in response to food cues that was modulated by different
feeding and eating styles. Healthy-weight participants increased activation (compared to
the other groups) to food in proportion to the level of parental restriction in visual areas of
the brain such as right lateral occipital cortex (LOC), right temporal occipital cortex, left
occipital fusiform gyrus, left lateral and superior LOC. Adolescents with type 2 diabetes mellitus
had higher activation (compared to the other groups) with increased parental restrictive
feeding in areas relating to emotional control, attention and decision-making, such as posterior
cingulate, precuneus, frontal operculum and right middle frontal gyrus. Participants with
type 2 diabetes mellitus also showed higher activation (compared to the other groups) in the
left anterior intraparietal sulcus and angular gyrus when they also reported higher self
restraint. Parental restriction did not modulate food responses in obese participants, but
there was increased activity in visual (visual cortex, left LOC, left occipital fusiform gyrus)
and reward related brain areas (thalamus and parietal operculum) in response to parental
teaching and modelling of behaviour. Parental restrictive feeding and parental teaching and
modelling affected neural responses to food cues in different ways, depending on motivations
and diagnoses, illustrating a social influence on neural responses to food cues.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0157037 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2016 |
Bibliographical note
The full text is also available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157037This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
