A review of eating disorder prevention programs

This review highlights that there are a number of promising eating disorder prevention programs that have been developed and evaluated. Several programs decreased current eating pathology and the risk for future increases in eating pathology, and even more programs decreased risk factors for eating pathology (e.g., body dissatisfaction). Certain intervention effects persisted for 2 years and were superior to alternative intervention and placebo control conditions. There may be several approaches to effectively preventing eating disturbances, but it appears that successful programs often decreased attitudinal risk factors and promoted healthy weight control behaviors. Further, larger intervention effects tended to occur in selected (vs. universal) programs, interactive (vs. didactic) programs, multi-session (vs. single-session) programs, and for evaluations that used validated outcome measures. Larger intervention effects also occurred for programs offered solely to females and to participants older than 15 years of age. Results also indicated that smaller effects occurred for interventions with psychoeducational content. Finally, there is evidence that programs that are not explicitly presented as an eating disorder prevention program produced more positive effects.