Intense craving for appetizing foods: validation and standardization of the Food Cravings Questionnaire-Trait in Mexico

Introduction: Food craving is a motivational and physiological response for eating specific foods, mainly with high caloric content. To assess food craving, the Food Cravings Questionnaire-Trait, which is a multi-dimensionally structured instrument that has been validated in several countries and has been shown to be sensitive and adaptable to contextual-cultural changes, is used among others. Objectives: To validate and standardize the Food Cravings Questionnaire-Trait in adults of Mexico City. Method: Non-experimental, cross-sectional, randomized study of 1059 subjects of both genders, between 18 and 84 years of age; 71.86 % of the female gender. Psychometric properties were examined with exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Results: The domains of the questionnaire were reduced and the items were reorganized differently with regard to the original version. The confirmatory factor analysis showed an adequate fit and acceptable standardization of factors. High internal consistency was found for the global questionnaire (alpha = 0.973 and rho = 0.975) for each one of the domains. Conclusion: This study determines the viability of the Food Cravings Questionnaire for the population of Mexico City.