Background
Obesity has increased steadily over the past decades, and has become a major public health concern worldwide [
1]. Unhealthy eating behaviours and obesity are considered among the main health risks for various diseases [
2], decrease in life expectancy [
3] and reduced quality of life [
4]. Commonly adopted approaches to prevent and treat obesity include improving food quality by increasing the proportion of consumed healthy food (fruit and vegetables), limiting calorie consumption, and encouraging physical activity (e.g., [
5]). However, low adherence to these lifestyle strategies substantially limits their effectiveness [
6], and may even lead to paradoxical weight gain [
7]. Therefore, there is an obvious necessity to develop more effective weight loss interventions. One potentially successful avenue for altering unhealthy eating habits and promoting weight reduction is mindfulness-based interventions [
8‐
10]; or more specifically, what has recently been called mindful eating behaviour [
11].
Mindfulness is a present-focussed experience consisting of consciously and intentionally directing attention to the moment’s attributes [
12], as well as maintaining a non-judgmental awareness of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts in the present moment [
13]. Based on this principle, mindful eating behaviour is intended to help the individual to increase their awareness of signals relating to fullness and hunger [
14,
15], therefore allowing them to lower their emotional response to eating [
16,
17], appropriately respond to internal or external hunger cues [
18,
19], and reduce food cravings induced by these cues [
20,
21]. In addition, mindful eating behaviour enables the individual to adjust their attitudes toward food and better understand their food aversions and preferences [
22]. As such, a growing evidence has documented positive effects of mindfulness-based interventions in reducing binge eating [
23,
24], decreasing impulsive food choices and delaying eating onset [
25,
26]. In addition, mindfulness has been found to significantly reduce uncontrolled and emotional eating [
27], as well as body mass index (BMI) [
28,
29]. Interestingly, mindfulness has also demonstrated positive effect on increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, decreasing fat and sugar consumption [
30], and reducing motivations to eat palatable foods [
31]; it has been linked to self-efficacy with regard to healthy eating [
32‐
35].
At this point, it is important to note the cultural differences toward mindful eating and more specifically food attitude. Previous studies [
36,
37] pointed out that subjects in individualistic societies tend to worry more about their weight and to adopt a negative attitude around food. In fact, it is an individual’s responsibility to eat correctly, mindfully and remain fit. If the individual fails, he or she is deemed irresponsible and is blamed. However, in collectivistic cultures, individuals belong to in-groups or collectives where members look after each other in exchange for loyalty [
38]. Hence, collectivism is characterized by a pre-eminence of the family as the most important facet of everyday life and as the major source of emotional comfort and support [
39]. One can infer that in collectivistic cultures, food may be regarded in a less mindful perception and a more positive way because it facilitates social interactions and enhances the benefits of others’ company [
40].
Given these multiple, increasingly clear benefits of mindful eating behaviour, there has been considerable recent interest in developing instruments to assess this construct. Framson et al. [
16] were the first to attempt developing an eating-specific mindfulness measure in 2009, i.e., the Mindful Eating Questionnaire (MEQ). It evaluates mindful eating through five dimensions: Disinhibition, Awareness, Emotional Response, External Cues, and Distraction [
16]. However, some overlap between items has been identified, as well as a difficulty to assess mindful eating in general situations (MEQ items rather refer to very specific situations such as parties and restaurant). Later, a shortened version of the MEQ has been developed to address these limitations [
41]. Overall, the MEQ in its two versions has been criticized by some researchers because of a lack of agreement with standard definitions and factor structure of mindfulness (e.g., [
42]). For instance, the MEQ only focuses on the emotional and bodily experiences related to eating, and does not include a nonjudgement or acceptance aspects of mindful eating. To overcome these gaps, a more recent measure, i.e. the Mindful Eating Scale (MES), has developed in 2014 by Hulbert-Williams et al.; and is comprised of 28 items and six factors, i.e. acceptance, non-reactivity, awareness, act with awareness, unstructured eating and routine [
43]. The MES has been developed with the aim of measuring the central features of mindfulness (non-judgement and attention) and to align with the existing general mindfulness scales. However, the MES still presented a number of flaws, such as the inclusion of items that do not seem to evaluate mindful eating (e.g., “I eat between meals” and “I snack when I’m bored”), or the inclusion of factors that measure the outcome of having learned skills of mindfulness rather than the mindful eating experience itself [
44].
More recently, Winkens et al. developed a new scale, i.e. the Mindful Eating Behavior Scale (MEBS), aiming at assessing the attention component of mindful eating without involving emotional and external eating, and thus evaluate the independent effects of mindful eating [
44]. The acceptance component has not been involved her because it has not been able to demonstrate any changes in eating behaviour [
45]. The MEBS consists of 17 items and four domains: Focused Eating, Eating without Distraction, Eating with Awareness, and Hunger and Satiety Cues. The developers of the MEBS considered the following definition of mindful eating: Eating with awareness and attention; which has been mainly inspired by the following definition of mindfulness “An enhanced attention to and awareness of current experience or present reality” [
46]. The MEBS has shown good psychometric properties in terms of internal consistency reliability and convergent validity in a large sample of Dutch adults [
44]. Later, two more scales have been developed: the 30-item, seven-factor Mindful eating inventory (MEI) [
47], and the 29-item, Four facet mindful eating scale (FFaMES) [
48].
The present validation study
In this study, our main goal was to provide a scale to measure the mindful eating behaviour for the Arabic-speaking population. To this end, we chose to translate and validate the MEBS in the Arabic language. We believe that this is relevant and highly needed, especially since there has been a drastic increase in the prevalence of obesity and its related diseases in the Arabic-speaking countries during the last decades [
49]. Various causal factors have been identified, such as sociocultural-related barriers to physical activity practicing and greater consumption of unhealthy food. These alarming rates of obesity have raised major concerns among clinicians working in Arab settings, especially given the lack of public awareness about the interaction between obesity and chronic diseases [
49]. As such, there is an obvious and urgent need to develop prevention and intervention strategies to combat obesity and unhealthy eating behaviours in the Arab context. One of the potential strategies is cultivating mindful eating behaviours. A first step toward developing such strategies is proving psychometrically sound scales to measure this construct that allows future experimental and intervention studies in the Arabic-speaking population. Apart from its psychometric characteristics and its theory-based factors allowing to exclusively assess the independent effects of mindful eating, we chose the MEBS for its brevity. Indeed, the MEBS enables to measure four domains of mindful eating using only 17 items, which would be more suitable in the low- to middle-income Arab countries, where longer scales may be challenging and costly to administer. Thus, we aimed through this study to explore the factor structure, composite reliability, measurement invariance across sex, convergent and divergent validity of an Arabic translation of the MEBS. We hypothesized that the Arabic MEBS will show an adequate internal reliability, an adequate fit of the data to a four-factor structure, invariance by sex, and good divergent validity as attested by its relationship with BMI, intuitive eating, self-esteem, and psychological distress.
Discussion
With the continued increase in the prevalence of obesity in Arab countries, it becomes urgent to develop new prevention and intervention approaches with novel targets that have proven efficacy in other contexts. In this paper, we propose to validate the Arabic version of the MEBS, with the aim of draw attention to this promising clinical and research avenue in the Arab settings. Our findings support the psychometric reliability and validity of the Arabic MEBS.
McDonald’s ω values ranged from 0.82 to 0.95 or the four mindful eating domains, indicating the excellent internal consistency reliability of the scale. These values further confirm the reliability of the MEBS that has been demonstrated in the original validation, where Cronbach’s alpha values varied between 0.717 and 0.907 for the four subscales [
44]. Our study also showed that fit indices from the CFA confirmed the original four-factor structure model of the MEBS proposed by Winkens et al. [
44]. Another study has also consistently replicated the same factor structure in an English-speaking population of British adults [
67]. Furthermore, our analyses suggested that configural, metric, and scalar invariance was supported across sexes. This was in line with the original validation, in which model fit was satisfactory for sex groups in the Dutch adult sample [
44]. This suggests that the Arabic MEBS seems to provide comparable measurements for individuals of both sexes. Our results found no sex difference in all MEBS subscales scores. In agreement with these findings, a Romanian study showed no influence of sex on mindful eating behaviour as assessing using the MEQ [
68]. Similarly, a study among Turkish undergraduate students found no significant sex difference in MEQ scores [
69].
As expected, we found positive correlations between Focused eating, Hunger and satiety cues on one hand, and intuitive eating on the other hand. Moreover, greater Hunger and satiety cues scores were correlated with higher self-esteem and lower BMI. These results support an adequate preliminary convergent validity of the Arabic MEBS. Intuitive eating refers to eating in response to innate satiety and hunger signals, without any restrictions on consumed food types [
70]. It thus represents another approach to weight management that has been shown to influence food intake and quality, to the same extent as mindful eating [
71]. In the original validation study, Winkens et al. has also documented positive correlations between three mindful eating domains of the MEBS (i.e., Focused Eating, Eating with Awareness, and Eating without Distraction) and self-esteem scores. Previous studies have also highlighted correlations in the same direction (e.g., [
72]). Finally, consistent with our findings, the MEBS domains previously showed negative correlations with BMI [
44]. However, it is also worth noting that prior research revealed mixed results on the link between mindful eating and BMI (for review, see [
45]). Overall, our findings represent a preliminary but important attempt towards gaining a better knowledge of how eating mindfully relate to weight, intuitive eating, and mental health issues in the Arab social and cultural background.
Limitations and research perspectives
This study has certain limitations that need to be addressed in future research. First, the cross-sectional design precludes drawing any causal conclusions. Second, due to the self-report nature of the questionnaire, the study may be subject to response bias. Third, even though our study targeted an Arabic-speaking population living in an Arab country (i.e., Lebanon), we are aware that further validation studies in other Arab contexts are still needed to ensure that the psychometric characteristics of our Arabic version of the MEBS are robust for replication in the broad Arabic-speaking community worldwide. Finally, even though we have been able to confirm measurement invariance for different sex groups, invariance across age, BMI and culture groups still needs to be demonstrated.
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