RESEARCH ARTICLE
More than Half of High School Students Report Disordered Eating: A Cross Sectional Study among Norwegian Boys and Girls Monica Klungland Torstveit*, Kjersti Aagedal-Mortensen, Tonje Holte Stea University of Agder, Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences, Kristiansand, Norway *
[email protected]
a11111
Abstract
OPEN ACCESS Citation: Torstveit MK, Aagedal-Mortensen K, Stea TH (2015) More than Half of High School Students Report Disordered Eating: A Cross Sectional Study among Norwegian Boys and Girls. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0122681. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0122681 Academic Editor: Karin Bammann, University of Bremen, GERMANY Received: June 30, 2014 Accepted: February 24, 2015 Published: March 31, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Torstveit et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Disordered eating and eating disorders are of great concern due to their associations with physical and mental health risks. Even if adolescence has been identified as the most vulnerable time for developing disordered eating, few studies have used a broad spectrum of criteria to investigate the prevalence of disordered eating among high school students of both genders, in different programs of study, nor assessed correlates of disordered eating among this important target group. The purposes of this study were therefore to investigate the prevalence and correlates of disordered eating among both male and female high school students in sport-, general and vocational programs. A comprehensive questionnaire was completed by 2,451 students (98.7%), aged 15–17 years. The total prevalence of disordered eating was 54.9%, with 64.3% among girls and 45.0% among boys (p
