Study: Latino Binge Eating Occurs More than Expected

Latino minorities have a higher prevalence for binge eating than originally thought, and a greater length of time spent in the U.S. could further increase this incidence, according to the results of a study published in a June online issue of the “International Journal of Eating Disorders.”

“I had done a lot of previous work looking at the comparisons between ethnic groups and eating disorders,” said Margarita Alegria, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance.

“This was the first really national study of this issue,” she said. “And while we thought the rates would be what we found for anorexia, we didn’t expect binge eating to be so high and the access to treatment to be so low.”

Alegria, who was the principal investigator of the project, said she and her group first sent in the proposal to do the study eight years ago.

“There was a lot of literature from people suggesting that certain variables played a role in certain Latino community samples,” Alegria said. “But not a lot had been done on the different Latino groups.”

Alegria described the data collection for the project as a “huge endeavor,” as the team subcontracted the actual collection through the University of Michigan.

After looking at U.S. census data to find areas where Latino populations tended to congregate, they used a “random national probability sample” to begin screening people, eventually finding just over 2,500 subjects for the study out of approximately 20,000 initial candidates.

While most previous researchers have focused on the prevelance of eating disorders in women, this study examined 1,127 males and 1,447 females and found no statistically significant differences.

All told, the study cost close to $4 million.

Alegria said the study was definitely merited given the seriousness of binge eating as a health risk.

“People lose control in terms of their food intake and eat beyond when they’re satisfied and full,” she said.

Although Alegria said she and her fellow researchers did not specify work habits as a variable in the study, she thinks that the typical Latino lifestyle could explain this disparity in eating disorders.

“In a lot of the jobs these people are in,” Alegria said, “they have difficulty eating at the end of the day when they are exhausted so they tend to eat a lot at once.”

Besides increased rates of overeating, another surprising find of the study was that frequencies of eating disorders tended to increase with the length of time the participants had lived in the United States.

While Alegria attributes this change to different diets and work flows, Zhun Cao, one of the study’s co-authors and a psychiatry instructor at the Medical School, said she sees another potential cause.

“In the U.S., cultural factors like beauty may affect the prevalence of eating disorders,” Cao said.

She added that the occurrence of many different mental health issues, including eating disorders, also appear related to length of time lived in America. “There is a correlation between frequency of the disorder and English proficiency,” said Cao, though she admitted that this association could be due to increased ability to explain health issues to English-speaking doctors.

Whatever the direct cause may be, Alegria said she hopes the study can help increase awareness regarding disparities in eating disorders.

“Now we’re more interested in seeing how we translate these results into intervention,” she said. “We need to help people identify where their problems are and how to deal with them.”

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss can be reached at strauss@fas.harvard.edu.