Adult picky eating is negatively associated with adherence to the Mediterranean diet

Interest in adult picky eating (PE), defined as the consumption of an inadequate variety of food through rejection of both familiar and unfamiliar foods, has grown rapidly in the last decade as it has been found to negatively relate to health outcomes. Research on PE is relatively scant and, somewhat, inconsistent, mostly due to the lack of a cross-culturally validated and psychometrically sound tool to accurately quantify this construct. Furthermore, associations between PE and healthy dietary patterns, such the Mediterranean Diet (MD), are still unexplored. Hence, the aim of this contribution is twofold: i) to bolster cross-cultural investigations on PE by translating and validating the Italian version of the 20-item Adult Picky Eating Questionnaire (APEQ; Ellis et al. 2017, He et al. 2019); ii) to assess the associations between PE and the adherence to the MD. The APEQ was translated into Italian (IT-APEQ) following a standard forward–backward procedure and administered online to a cohort of 1038 Italian adults (70.3 % female; 18-75 yo). Participants also completed a series of psychometric measures, a validated tool to measure the adherence to the MD (Gnagnarella et al. 2018), and reported the frequency of consumption of 109 common foods in the Italian context. The IT-APEQ demonstrated good psychometric properties as it showed adequate internal consistency (α=0.84), test-retest reliability (ICC=0.79), invariance across gender, and expected correlations (e.g., with food neophobia). Moreover, PE was negatively associated with the adherence to the MD and with diet variety for both prototypical and not-prototypical Mediterranean food groups. Psychosocial and biological correlates underlying this phenomenon, the differences between PE and food neophobia, and available strategies to reduce PE and support healthier dietary choices will be discussed.