Inhibitory Control Effects in Adolescent Binging Behavior and Consumption of Sweetened Beverages and Snacks

Introduction: Prefrontally mediated impulse control and sensitivity to reward (mediated by subcortical systems) are relevant to the food choices individuals make frequently on a daily basis.  An imbalance of these inhibitory systems can lead to deficits in decision-making that are relevant to food ingestion and can be detected with neurocognitive tasks. Good inhibitory functioning reflects the ability to actively stop a pre-potent behavioral response (e.g., overeating) after it has been triggered. Adequate affective decision-making reflects an integration of cognitive and affective systems and the ability to more optimally weigh short-term gains against long-term losses or probable outcomes of an action. Individuals with an imbalance in these regulatory systems have a tendency to act more impulsively.

Methods: This study evaluated the relationship between dietary behaviors - binging behavior and consumption of sweetened beverages and snacks - and inhibitory control among 199 youth ranging in age from 14 to 17.  Behavioral control functioning was assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task, a generic Go/NoGo task, and a food-specific Go/NoGo to increase our understanding of the processes affecting the behavioral regulation of eating among youth. The food-specific version of the Go/NoGo directly ties the task to food cues that trigger responses, addressing an integral link between cue-habit processes.  Inhibitory control becomes highly relevant when encountering cues strongly associated with a behavior. Sedentary behavior was included in all analyses as a covariate.

Results:  Results of multi-group latent variable models revealed sedentary behavior and more inhibitory problems, assessed using both the food-specific Go/NoGo and the generic Go/NoGo, to be significant predictors of binging behavior in females. For males, only sedentary behavior predicted binging behavior. Inhibitory problems on the generic Go/NoGo and poorer affective decision-making predicted sweetened drink consumption in males, but not in females. The food-specific Go/NoGo was not predictive in models evaluating sweetened drink consumption, providing some initial discriminate validity for the task, which consisted of sweet/fatty snacks as NoGo cues, with no sweetened drinks as cues. Alternatively, more inhibitory problems on the food-specific Go/NoGo and generic Go/NoGo both significantly predicted sweet snack consumption in males. Only sedentary behavior predicted sweet snack consumption in females.

Conclusions: These findings contribute to research implicating the importance of individual differences in inhibitory function ability relevant to behavioral control, the relevance of cues in habit behaviors, and their relationship to snack food consumption in adolescents.