According to a new study, Muslim teenagers suffer twice as severely from eating disorders and body dissatisfaction as do Christian teens.
As reported at ScienceDaily, the study was conducted at the University of Granada in Spain, and "is pioneer in addressing the relationship between religion, eating disorders and body image perception among adolescents." The researchers examined 494 students aged 12-20 years from three public schools in Ceuta, an exclave city that is technically part of Spain yet is located in northernmost Africa and surrounded by Morocco. Ceuta's population numbers around 75,000, 30 percent of which is Muslim.
The incidence of eating disorders was found to be 2.3 times higher among Muslim adolescents than among their Christian classmates. Body dissatisfaction was 1.8 times higher among the Muslim teens.
The study's lead author, Francisco Javier Ramón Jarne, is affiliated with the University of Granada's Institute of Neuroscience.
As quoted at ScienceDaily, Jarne says this research "addresses a subject that has never been studied in Spain before: the relationship between religious affiliation, eating disorders and body image perception. As regards other international studies, this is one of the few comparative studies ever made by religious affiliation and gender."
Spain's increasing multiculturalism "makes the results of this study very interesting from the point of view of preventive medicine and public health," Jarne muses.
"Affiliation to the Islamic religion taken as a socio-cultural factor can also be associated to these disorders, even though the thin ideal" -- that is, slenderness as an aesthetic goal -- "is not associated with Islamic culture."
