Characteristics of Eating Alone Affecting the Stress, Depression, and Suicidal Ideation
- PDF / 602,002 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 38 Downloads / 209 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Characteristics of Eating Alone Affecting the Stress, Depression, and Suicidal Ideation Yujeong Kim1 · Eunmi Lee2 · Haeyoung Lee3 Received: 7 August 2019 / Accepted: 9 April 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study aimed to identify the characteristics of eating alone that influence stress, depression, and suicidal ideation in Korean adults. This study was a cross-sectional survey using the raw data of the sixth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES VI) conducted in 2015. The survey sampled 7380 adults, of whom 3515 were included in this analysis. The odds of stress were 1.308 times higher in individuals who ate dinner alone than those who ate dinner with others. The odds of having depressive symptoms were 1.711 times and 1.531 times higher in individuals who ate lunch and dinner alone, respectively, than those who ate lunch or dinner with others. The association between eating alone and suicidal ideation was statistically significant only in the simple model. There is a need for interventional programs that can reduce negative relationships of eating alone behaviors for preventing mental health problems. Keywords Depression · Eating behavior · Stress · Suicidal ideation
Introduction
The Phenomena of Eating Alone
The recent rise in single-person households and individualistic tendencies in Korea have led to a rapid increase in the number of people eating alone (Shin 2017). The percentage of single-person households in Korea increased to 27.2% in 2016 which is more than triple the rate of 9.0% reported in 1990 (Statistics Korea 2017), and it has been reported that 91.8% of single-person households most of the time (Oh 2016). In addition, there has been an increasing trend of eating alone to be more efficient in a competitive social atmosphere. According to a 2016 analysis report on eating-out behavior, Korean adults eat alone half the time when eating out, which shows that the frequency of eating alone is high (Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs 2016).
Many young adults simply enjoy spending time alone during the meals and choose to eat alone at restaurants, which is consistent with the phenomenon in which modern individuals opt to self-isolate themselves due to feelings of exhaustion from their relationships with others and as a means to escape from the pressure of interpersonal relationships (Kim et al., 2016). Maintaining social relationships requires one to bear financial and time costs in addition to spending emotional energy, and the number of people who want to be free from these psychological burdens and prefer to be alone is increasing, subsequently leading to the increased number of people eating alone (Nam 2016). Eating alone may be viewed as an expression of exhaustion from interpersonal relationships. People, who feel exhausted from interpersonal relationships that are vast in scope and number due to information technology and social media rather than deep, developed interpersonal relations
Data Loading...
