Testing Dietary Restraint

Many studies have questioned the validity of the dietary restraint hypothesis. One reason is concern over the legitimacy of different methods used to measure dietary restraint. Researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Institute recently tested four popular measures of dietary restraint in 48 subjects randomly assigned to 4 treatment arms in a 6-month study. The subjects were evaluated with the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire, the Eating Inventory (EI), Revised Restraint Scale (RS), and the Current Dieting Questionnaire. The RS was the most valid measure of the intent to diet and actual caloric restriction (Appetite 2007;48:183.)