How Childhood Socioeconomic Status Impacts Adult Food Preference: The Mediating Role of Stress and Trait Appetite
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior research has shown that adults who were raised in a low socioeconomic status (SES) environment are more likely to desire energy-dense foods. Research has also shown a positive correlation between current stress levels and the desire for energy-dense foods. We hypothesized that stress and trait appetite mediate the relationship between childhood SES and the desire for low and high-energy-dense foods. In this study, 311 adults participated in an online experiment in which they were shown images of five food items from each of the six major food categories (vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy, meat/poultry, and sweets) and rated how desirable each food item is. Next, we asked a series of questions that identified the participant’s sex, early childhood socioeconomic conditions, and current stress level. We also identified whether the participants had a trait or state eating personality. A path analysis was used to confirm the hypothesis that stress plays a mediating role between SES and food preference, and that an orderly relationship exists between these variables. The results show the hypothesis was supported and that the results were statistically significant. Specifically, the results show that the desire for low and high-energy-dense foods is indirectly influenced by one’s early childhood environment, and that food desirability is mediated by both stress and trait appetite. In addition, this analysis showed that in some situations, stress can both increase and decrease the desire for high-energy-dense foods. These findings also contribute to our understanding of how environmental conditions (safe and harsh environments) affect appetite and the desire for low and high-energy-dense foods. It also provided a deeper understanding of how these food choices can be adaptive under different ecological conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".