Introduction: The EATMOT Project is a multinational study that is being carried out in 16
countries about different eating motivations, given their recognized importance in the definition
of people’s dietary patterns.
Objective: This study investigated the influence of sociodemographic factors on some types of
eating motivations, specifically: health related factors; economic and availability aspects;
emotional determinants; social, cultural and religious influences; marketing and advertising
campaigns and finally environmental concerns.
Methods: This is a longitudinal observational study carried out on a non-probabilistic sample
with 11960 participants. For the analysis of the data were used the T-test for independent samples or ANOVA with Post-Hoc Tukey HSD, depending on the case. The modelling through
artificial neural networks included 7 input variables (sociodemographic characteristics) and 6
output variables (the eating motivations’ groups).
Results: Variables like age, marital status, country, living environment, level of education or
professional area significantly influenced all the types of eating motivations analysed. However,
regarding gender, no significant differences were observed for two of the six types of
motivations analysed: economic & availability and marketing & commercial. The results of the
ANN modelling showed that the strongest positive factors determining the eating motivations
were age for health, country for emotional motivations, gender for economic & availability,
country for social & cultural, country for environmental & political, and finally country also for
the marketing & commercial motivations.
Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of the sociodemographic characteristics as
determinants for eating patterns around the globe, and particularly the geographic location.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
