Adolescência, o corpo e a praia: um estudo sobre a insatisfação com o peso entre os residentes nas capitais do litoral e do interior do Brasil

Abstract

Body image is defined as a multidimensional psychological construct. Body dissatisfaction (BD) is its single most studied aspect in scientific literature and is also considered to be a preliminary symptom of Eating Disorders. Additionally, it has been associated with weight management risk behaviors (e.g. weight loss inducing drugs or anabolic steroids abuse, diet restriction etc.). Moreover, BD is related to psychological issues such as depression, low self-esteem and potentially suicidal behavior. Elucidating its etiology is, therefore, essential for health promotion in adolescence. Objective/Methods: This research aims to describe the etiological factors of BD. From a systematic revision, it was possible to verify that studies considering situational factors (such as more body exposition) are very scarce. As a complementary work of ERICA (Study of Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Adolescents, in Portuguese), we compared the reported body weight dissatisfaction of teenagers ranging from 12 to 17 years old that lived in the littoral and inner capitals of Brazil, amongst other relevant variables. Results: From a population of 52,894 adolescents, 43,6% reported dissatisfaction with body weight. The univariate analysis showed a significant association between BD and the following variables: female sex, older age, more advanced pubertal stage, going to private schools, physical inactivity (less than 300 minutes per week) and symptoms of common mental disorders. The multivariate analysis confirmed these results. It also indicated that being either overweight/obese or low-weight, as well as having greater measures of waist circumference were associated with higher chances of reporting weight dissatisfaction. Finally, living in the littoral capitals had also a significant correlation with weight dissatisfaction (p=0,005). Discussion/conclusions: This was not methodologically designed for the evaluation of BD, which could, in part, explain the lack of goodness-of-fit of the logistic regression models. However, it is an original research about BD, with one of the best numbered populations of adolescents ever described. Our results are innovative and, despite being insufficient to fully explain the outcome, they suggest that living by the beach in Brazil may be, indeed, associated with a greater prevalence of weight dissatisfaction. This brings new light into a situational variable of BD etiology that is almost unexplored, in adolescence. We hope our findings will become a starting point for new methods that explore in more depth the effect of such environments and other cultural variables in the specific context of youth in Brazil