This study compared university students with and without ADHD on what they eat and how they judge food. It looked at 105 undergraduates at the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, aged 22 to 30. Of these, 36 had been diagnosed with ADHD and 69 had no ADHD diagnosis. The two groups were alike in age, gender, body weight, sleep and physical activity. Most students with ADHD who answered used medication only now and then or not at all.
Students filled in a new questionnaire about 16 healthy and 16 unhealthy foods. They rated how attractive, convenient and risky each food seemed, and how likely they were to eat it. They also reported how often they ate different foods.
Students with ADHD ate healthy foods less often and unhealthy foods more often. This difference was unlikely to be down to chance. But the two groups judged the foods in much the same way. They did not differ on attractiveness, convenience, risk or how likely they said they were to eat the foods. Leaving out students who took medication in the day before made no real difference.
Across all students, finding healthy food attractive and convenient went with eating it more often. Seeing food as risky did not. Only attractiveness went with saying they were likely to eat healthy food. The authors call this a gap between eating behavior and how people judge food.
The authors note that all students came from one faculty. The students with ADHD were high functioning. The questionnaire was new and untested.
The numbers Stats and what the terms mean
The statistics behind the plain-language claims above.
- Hershko, 2022: healthy to unhealthy ratio of how often foods were eaten, ADHD vs control, median (interquartile range), 1.10 (0.97 to 1.23) vs 1.58 (1.28 to 2.19).
- Hershko, 2022: group difference in how often healthy vs unhealthy foods were eaten, Z = −5.86, p < 0.001.
- Hershko, 2022: no group difference in rated attractiveness, Z = −0.11, p = 0.91.
- Hershko, 2022: no group difference in rated convenience, Z = −0.84, p = 0.40.
- Hershko, 2022: no group difference in rated risk, Z = −0.20, p = 0.84.
- Hershko, 2022: no group difference in rated likelihood of eating the foods, Z = −0.32, p = 0.75.
- Hershko, 2022: attractiveness predicting how often healthy food was eaten, whole sample, B 0.74 (CI 0.22 to 1.17).
- Hershko, 2022: convenience predicting how often healthy food was eaten, whole sample, B 0.40 (CI 0.11 to 0.59).
- Hershko, 2022: risk predicting how often healthy food was eaten, whole sample, B −0.13 (CI −0.52 to 0.27).
- Hershko, 2022: share of differences in how often healthy food was eaten explained by these ratings, R2 0.34.
- Hershko, 2022: attractiveness predicting rated likelihood of eating healthy food, whole sample, B 1.21 (CI 0.77 to 1.59), R2 0.47. What the terms mean:
- Median (interquartile range) The middle value, with the range that holds the middle half of the students.
- Z A test score for the difference between the groups; the further from zero, the bigger the gap.
- p How likely a result this large would be if there were no real difference; below 0.05 is usually treated as unlikely to be chance.
- B How much the eating measure changes for each one-step change in a rating.
- CI The range the true value probably falls in; if it crosses zero, the link may not be real.
- R2 The share of the differences between students that the ratings account for, from 0 (none) to 1 (all).
Source: Hershko S, Cortese S, Ert E, et al.. Food Perceptions in Adults with and without ADHD. Psychopathology (2022). doi:10.1159/000524315