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Abstract
What triggers us to start or stop eating, and also decide what and how much we eat? There are many established questionnaires that have been developed to assess one's motivation to eat. Among the most widely used is the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ) that was developed in 1985. Among the three factors in the TFEQ, "disinhibition" refers to the lack of control and tendency to overeat or eat opportunistically in response to certain cues and circumstances. TFEQ has been widely used in many different countries both in its original form or modified versions to suit the study population's specific cultural and societal characteristics. However, there has not been an assessment tool tailored for South Korea and especially its capital Seoul, a city with the highest population density even among other megacities of developed countries, resulting in a highly intensified food environment with many potential implications on eating behavior. Also, both the corporate and social culture revolving highly around eating and drinking may create numerous opportunities that impact food choice and consumption in the corporate-working population. Therefore, the overall goal of this study is to expand the domain of "disinhibition" from the TFEQ and develop a Disinhibited Eating Score for Koreans (DESK) Questionnaire. This study has two components: 1) the development and administration of a scored scale questionnaire that measures an individual's degree of control in response to various factors of "disinhibited eating", and 2) a focused recall assessing self-reported intake of undesirable foods (categorized as high fat, high sodium, sweets, and alcohol) to examine the correlation between DESK score and food choice/intake in this population.
