Students commonly experience stress and associated eating disturbances, which may lead to health problems and lower well-being. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms behind these eating...Show moreStudents commonly experience stress and associated eating disturbances, which may lead to health problems and lower well-being. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms behind these eating disturbances, specifically stress-induced hyperphagia and hypophagia. Knowledge about these mechanisms is important as it may further the development of effective interventions to reduce harmful eating disturbances. In this study, questionnaires forstress-induced hyperphagia and hypophagia (Salzburg Stress Eating Scale), perceived stress (PSS-10), reward sensitivity, and behavioural inhibition (BAI) were administered to a sample of 210 Dutch university students in a cross-sectional research design. A regression analysis was performed on a model with as dependent variable stress-induced hyperphagia and hypophagia (SSES) and as dependent variables perceived stress (PSS2), reward sensitivity (BAS-Reward) and behavioural inhibition (BIS2) with the covariates BMI and gender. PSS2 and BIS2 were tested quadratically as this was speculated to fit the data best. None of the main predictors, PSS2 (B = 0.000, p = 0.503), BAS-Reward (B = -0.163, p = 0.217) and BIS2 (B = 0.019, p = 0.283), were significantly associated with SSES, only the covariate BMI (B = 0.073, p < 0.001). Thus, none of the dependent variables of the regression model seem to predict stress-induced hyperphagia and hypophagia, next to the covariate BMI. This does not correspond to prior research which does find associations between the independent variables and SSES. However, this research is mostly performed in clinical populations and might not hold true for non-clinical populations. This study has several limitations, including a cross-sectional design and biases associated with self-reports, but also several strengths, such as testing variables quadratically and studying a student population with varying levels of stress. A final suggestion is made to focus on the factors that give healthy students high levels of stress, instead of their stress-induced behaviours.Show less
Since, as anthropologists and cultural critics have argued, food and food practices constitute a system of communication that conveys social meaning, food as a cultural and social practice and as a...Show moreSince, as anthropologists and cultural critics have argued, food and food practices constitute a system of communication that conveys social meaning, food as a cultural and social practice and as a literary trope provides insight into society and culture and the identities they produce. If we are what we eat, food is an important means to define and, more specifically, perform our identities. In a globalizing world, in which both people and products constantly travel, food follows migratory flows. When placed in a political, economic, and cultural context food functions as a boundary marker as well as a boundary crosser. This makes food a useful trope in postcolonial and other migrant literature in particular, as these novels explore the effects of migration and cultural encounters on the formation, negotiation, and performance of identities. Placing my reading of Desai’s postcolonial novel The Inheritance of Loss in the theoretical framework of food theories, I will argue that Desai uses food as a metaphorical instrument not only to deconstruct colonial identities, such as that of the Anglophile judge and his friends, and fixed ethnic identities, such as Biju’s, but also to imagine more fluid, multiple, migrant identities, such as Saeed Saeed’s, and to focus attention on unequal power relations and the fluidity of nationhood and national identity.Show less
