Discounting of Hyper-Palatable Food and Money: Associations with Food Addiction Symptoms.

Introduction: Delay discounting (DD), the tendency to prefer small, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards, is associated with health-risk behaviors. The study examined associations between DD for money and hyper-palatable foods (HPF) with food addiction (FA) symptoms among a general population sample.

Methods: Participants (N = 296) completed an adjusting DD task that consisted of a single-commodity condition with HPF as the reward (HPF now vs. HPF later) and cross-commodity conditions comparing money and HPF (money now vs. HPF later; HPF now vs. money later). The Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 was used to assess FA symptoms. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression models tested whether discounting of HPF and money was associated with FA symptoms.

Results: Findings indicated there were no significant associations between DD and FA symptoms in the single-commodity HPF condition (logit: OR = 1.02, -value = 0.650; count: IRR = 1.04, -value = 0.515). There were no significant associations among cross-commodity conditions comparing money now vs. HPF later (logit: OR = 0.96, -value = 0.330; count: IRR = 1.02, -value = 0.729) or conditions comparing HPF now vs. money later (logit: OR = 1.02, -value = 0.682; count: IRR = 0.92, -value = 0.128) and FA symptoms.

Conclusions: Discounting HPF may not be a key behavioral feature among individuals who endorse FA symptoms.