Public Health Nutrition: 13(1), 32–37 doi:10.1017/S1368980009005709 Eating behaviour and eating disorders in students of nutrition sciences Anne Korinth, Sonja Schiess and Joachim Westenhoefer* Public Health Research Group, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Applied Sciences Hamburg, Lohbruegger Kirchstr. 65, 21033 Hamburg, Germany Submitted 14 January 2008: Accepted 31 March 2009: First published online 12 May 2009 Abstract Objective: Sometimes the suspicion is put forward that nutrition students show more disordered eating patterns, which may be among the motivating factors to study nutrition. At the same time, it is not clear whether the students’ increasing knowledge about diet and nutrition is associated with a more healthy eating behaviour or with an unhealthy obsession with food choices. Design: Cross-sectional comparison of nutrition students from German uni- versities during the first year of their studies (n 123) and during higher semesters (n 96), with a control group from other study programmes (n 68 and n 46, respectively). Dietary restraint, disinhibition, the tendency towards orthorexia nervosa and healthy food choices were assessed using a questionnaire. Results: Nutrition students showed higher levels of dietary restraint than the control group. Disinhibition and orthorexia nervosa did not differ between nutrition students and controls. Orthorexic tendencies were lower in the more advanced nutrition students. Healthy food choices did not differ among students in the first year. More advanced nutrition students showed healthier food choices, whereas the corresponding controls showed slightly more unhealthy food choices. Conclusions: Nutrition students, more than other students, tend to restrict their food intake in order to control their weight, but they do not have more disturbed or disordered eating patterns than other students. Moreover, during the course of their studies, they adopt slightly more healthy food choices and decrease their tendency to be obsessive in their eating behaviour. Keywords Eating disorders Eating behaviour Nutrition information Nutritional knowledge Strategies of health promotion and health education often focus on providing information and knowledge to the consumer, particularly with regard to diet and nutrition. The aim of providing information and knowledge is to enable the consumer to make informed choices, and obviously it is hoped that the informed choices will be healthier choices. For example, the recent European Commission white paper on a strategy for Europe on Nutrition, Overweight and Obesity (1) states that ‘only the well-informed consumer is able to make rational deci- sions’ (p. 3). Nevertheless, the role of knowledge and information in controlling dietary behaviours may be rather limited. Several studies have documented that there are only poor relationships between nutrition knowledge on the one hand, and attitudes about foods or consumption of foods on the other hand (2–5) . French children, for example, were able to list healthy foods, but nevertheless, the most preferred foods were foods which are high in sugar and/or fat (6) . Another study found that nutrition knowledge was not correlated with the BMI in patients from a general practice (7) . However, other studies reported positive associations between nutrition knowl- edge and food consumption as well (8,9) . The limited relationship between nutrition knowledge and food intake may be explained by the finding that attitudes to foods are dependent on several evaluative bases, among which health evaluations are only one; and that nutri- tion knowledge moderates the relationship between health evaluations of foods and general attitudes towards foods: in subjects with better knowledge, health evalua- tions influenced attitudes to foods more strongly than in subjects with poorer knowledge (10) . Attempts to make people more aware of their food intakes and increase their nutritional knowledge might also have undesirable effects in subgroups of the population. During recent years, the description of a new eating disorder, orthorexia nervosa, has been proposed (11) . The defining feature of this disorder is an obsession with eating healthy food and avoiding unhealthy food. This description of an eating disorder is far from being a commonly accepted diagnostic category. Nevertheless, it has initiated some preliminary work, examining this idea in more *Corresponding author: Email joachim@westenhoefer.de r The Authors 2009 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980009005709 Published online by Cambridge University Press