Validating the Italian version of the Adult Picky Eating Questionnaire

Interest in adult picky eating (PE), i.e., the unwillingness to eat familiar foods or try novel foods, has grown rapidly in the last decade as a result of its negative health consequences. Fairly poor data are available on the prevalence of PE in Italy, mostly due to the lack of a psychometrically sound tool to measure this construct. Thus, this contribution aimed at translating and validating the 20-item Adult Picky Eating Questionnaire (APEQ) for use in the Italian context. The APEQ was translated into Italian (IT-APEQ) following a standard forward-backward procedure and administered online to a large cohort of Italian adults (N = 1030, 69.9% women, 18-75 yo), who also completed a series of psychometric and dietary measures to test both the convergent and discriminant validity of the IT-APEQ. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the original four-factor structure of APEQ. The IT-APEQ showed invariance across genders, good internal consistency, and strong test-retest reliability (N = 599, 70.5% women, 18-75 yo). As expected, the IT-APEQ was positively associated with eating inflexibility, food neophobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and disgust propensity/sensitivity, whereas it was anticorrelated with indices of diet variety. Moreover, we documented for the first time a negative link between adult PE and adherence to the Mediterranean diet. Our results suggest that the IT-APEQ demonstrates sound psychometric properties. Hence, we advocate its future usage to shed light into other correlates of PE in the Italian context and bolster cross-cultural research on adult PE, which is key to developing targeted strategies aimed at improving diet diversity and quality.

Automated summary

Interest in adult picky eating has increased due to its negative health consequences. This study translated and validated a questionnaire for use in Italy, finding that it demonstrated good psychometric properties and was associated with various dietary and psychological factors.