Soft Drink Addiction Scale: Reliability and Validity Analysis in Young Mexican People

Abstract

It has been proposed that the consumption of foods high in sugar or fat may cause addictive behavior. The aim of this study was to adapt and validate a soft drink addiction scale that can be used in future studies and to strengthen the proposal of food addiction with the hypothesis that people with high consumption of soft drinks have similar characteristics to people who consume abuse drugs. A non-probabilistic convenience sample of 394 Mexican participants answered a soft drinks’ consumption frequency questionnaire, an addiction scale, and a self-efficacy scale for soft drinks’ consumption. Additionally, anthropometric measurements were taken. The addiction scale showed three factors with an adequate reliability (Cronbach’s alpha coefficient = 0.903), as well as construct validity and criterion validity with the self-efficacy scale and total body fat percentage on soft drinks, mainly those with substantial caloric content. Additionally, the results showed a predictive value for soft drink consumption, strengthening its validity. This scale is useful to identify and evaluate the characteristic patterns of a substance addiction. The total reliability indicates that the items as a whole are correlated with each other and that the scale is stable to be used over time. This is the first study that evaluates the addictive characteristics of soft drink consumption through a scale, and it represents an advance in the exploration of the behavioral sciences field and an important tool for the creation of public health policies, mainly in countries with a high consumption of these beverages.