ONE SIZE FITS ALL - IMPLICATIONS FOR ASSESSING DIETARY BEHAVIOR

Accurate assessment of dietary behavior is central to the design, impl ementation, and evaluation of intervention programs aimed at behavior change, and use of an Eating Behaviors Questionnaire (EBQ) has been su ggested for measuring dimensions of dietary fat behavior. The EBQ has proven useful in characterizing fat-related dietary patterns among mid dle-class, highly educated, highly motivated white women. To investiga te the generalizability of the instrument, we provide findings from a community-based sample of 235 African-Americans in Maywood, Illinois, a middle-class working community outside Chicago. The sample consisted of 159 women and 76 men with an average age of 47.4+/-13.8 years for women and 48.1+/-12.1 gears for men (mean +/- standard deviation; rang e, 18 to 87 years). The EBQ is based on four broad behavioral domains (ie, avoidance, modification, substitution, and replacement) associate d with fat-related eating patterns. These behavioral domains are compo sed of specific dietary behaviors (factors). Using a scoring system th at allowed all participants to be included in all analyses, we identif ied a set of factors characterizing eating patterns in our sample that differed from those reported previously. When the factors were conver ted to scales using unit scoring, the average value suggested a tenden cy toward a higher fat eating pattern. Results indicate that although behavioral domains appear to be constant across populations, fat-relat ed eating patterns are not. These observations have implications for u nderstanding the diversity of fat-related dietary patterns across grou ps and for planning appropriate behavior change strategies.