Food-cravings, Body Image and Eating Disorders: Perspectives across Cultures and Genders

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Background

This Research Topic is the second volume of Research Topic "Beyond Eating and Body Image Disturbances: Cultural, Transcultural and Accultural Perspectives". Please see the first volume here.

This Research Topic aims to examine the connection between food-cravings, body image and eating disorders in different cultural settings. Within the present topic, food-cravings are broadly defined as desires to consume food products and its accompanying feelings. Body image refers to the constellation of thoughts, feelings, and overall evaluation of a person about their weight, body shape and/or physical appearance. It is believed that both food-cravings and body dissatisfaction are both symptoms and contributing factors in the development, maintenance and relapse of eating disorders and their comorbidities. While eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia were originally described as Western, female phenomena, the prevalence and manifestation of eating disorders across other cultures and genders warrant further examination.

Body image and eating disorder disturbances are often conceptualized as modern, Western-bound disorders fueled by capitalist practices that use popular media to simultaneously advertise unattainable female standards of beauty and consumables that sell “beauty and happiness.” This Western-bound theory may or may not explain the prevalence of body image disturbances and eating disorders in non-Anglophone (non-Western) countries, or among male and gender-nonbinary individuals. The scientific study of food-cravings, body image and eating disorders, like most other mental health and psychological phenomena, has historically been carried out on Anglophone populations by English-speaking scientists who publish their work in Anglophone professional journals. This absence of non-Western insights into the etiologies and manifestations of these disorders gives us a narrow perspective that can only be widen by widening and increasing research that is more globally and culturally inclusive.

As part of this collection, we welcome submissions that will help broaden our theoretical and empirical understanding of body image disturbances and eating disorders across different ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities. More precisely, we welcome papers addressing any of the following:
1. Characteristics and mechanisms of food cravings, body image, and eating disorders in Western and non-Western societies.
2. Cross cultural research and conceptualizations about the function or mechanistic role of constructs that correlate with food-cravings, body-image disturbances and eating disorders (e.g., body mass composition, family influence, socio-economic status, psychological power, the use of social networks, etc.).
3. Conceptualizations and analyses of the emergence of body image disturbances and eating disorders in Western and non-Western and/or developing countries, including food addiction, food cravings, fat-stigma, and body image, in male and female cisgender, transgender and nonbinary individuals.
4. Development or adaptation of assessment tools to examine body-image or eating-disorder associated constructs across different cultures, languages, and/or religious beliefs.

Keywords: Body image, body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, transcultural, acculturation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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