Australian Psychologist Eating attitudes, body mass index, age, and gender 1 The relationship between eating attitudes, body mass index, age, and gender in Australian university students Kenny, D. T. & Adams, R. D. Australian Psychologist,1994, 29, 2, 128-135. University students (N = 1485) completed the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI) from Garner and Olmsted (1984) and a questionnaire designed to obtain physical and social background data. Although body mass indices (BMI) for females were lower than for males, females were more dissatisfied with their bodies and had higher drive for thinness than males across all categories of BMI. Even the most overweight (BMI > 30) males were more satisfied with their bodies than the most underweight females. This subgroup (BMI = 16–17) had profiles which were most discrepant from the Garner and Olmsted EDI profile for anorexic females, that is, their scores on the subscales of drive for thinness, bulimia, body dissatisfaction, and ineffectiveness were lower than those found for females in all other categories of BMI. Results indicated that the eating attitudes of this sample of Australian university students were similar to those previously reported for American and British students. This study supports the view that sociocultural variables have aetiological significance in shaping female Australian university students’ eating attitudes and behaviours. However, these variables alone do not appear sufficient to account for the development of an eating disorder.. INTRODUCTION The epidemiology of eating disorders, as with many other psychiatric syndromes, has often been based on clinical descriptions of the condition in hospitalised patients. This practice has contributed to the perception of clinical syndromes as discrete entities, discontinuous from the normal population. However, there has been growing recognition that eating problems are relatively common in certain community groups such as college student populations (Halmi, Falk, & Schwartz, 1981) and professional dance and modelling students (Gamer & Garfinkel, 1980). It is not clear how these eating problems relate to the clinical syndromes nor the degree to which they contribute to or precede the development of the full clinical syndrome. Recent conceptualisations of anorexia nervosa and bulimia have advocated a dimensional model of the illness, in which normal concerns about weight and shape are continuous with partial or subclinical forms which in turn merge with the clinical syndrome (King, 1989). Three recent large-scale surveys from the United Kingdom (King, 1989), the United States (Whitaker et al., 1989) and New Zealand (Hall & Hay, 1991) obtained similar prevalence rates of approximately 1% for a clinical eating disorder. Females were much more likely to report symptoms, and bulimia was the more prevalent disorder. When partial syndromes were included, female prevalence rates in a general practice population rose to 4% (King, 1989). Similar rates for the prevalence of partial syndromes of between 3–5% have been reported for British female college and university students (Button & Whitehouse, 1981; Clarke & Palmer, 1983) and for British schoolgirls (Szmulker, 1983). A number of researchers have calculated prevalence estimates of individual symptoms for female subjects aged 12–27 years. Between 70% to 80% reported that they wished to lose weight (Dwyer, Feldman, Seltzer, & Mayer, 1969; Huenemann, Shapiro, Hampton, & Mitchell, 1966; Huenemann, Hampton, Behnke, Shapiro, & Mitchell, 1974), 73% reported that they had at some stage felt fat, and 61–86% had been on a diet (Abraham, Mira, Beumont. Sowerbutts, & Llewellyn-Jones, 1983; Dwyer et al., 1969). The estimated prevalence rate of 30–40% for “simple dieting” in 15-year-old females has remained constant for 25 years (Patton, Johnson-Sabine, Wood, Mann, & Wakeling, 1990). An Australian study (Abraham et al.. 1983) reported that of their sample of 106 15–27-year- old female school and university students, 17% had reported engaging in weekly binge eating, 5% abused laxatives, and 3% abused diuretics and diet pills. No one from their sample reported inducing vomiting. A comparable American study (Crowther, Post, & Zaynor, 1985) of 363 female school students reported that 24% of their sample engaged in weekly binge eating, 12% abused laxatives, and 22% self- induced vomiting. Bulimia was diagnosed in 7.7% of the sample. Although American rates for bulimic symptomatology appear higher than Australian rates, the results are not directly comparable due to differences in completion rates of postal questionnaires (100% in the former compared to 34% in the latter study), sampling differences,