How do high-profile incidents of racial discrimination affect the eating habits of Black women?

Around the time of the untimely death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man in police custody, researchers from Johns Hopkins University were collecting data for Communities CARING , a study that examined the relationship of health behaviors among public housing residents in East and West Baltimore communities in Maryland. Led by Kristal Lyn Brown, Ph.D.

, an assistant professor in Drexel University's College of Nursing and Health Professions, a secondary analysis of the data collected for Communities CARING examined the relationship between a high-profile event (Gray's death) and disordered eating behaviors of Black women both before and after unrest. Recently published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities , differences in eating behaviors—emotional eating, uncontrolled eating, cognitive restraint—among Black women residing in the neighborhood near where Gray lived were compared to the eating behaviors of women living in a similar neighborhood farther away, on the other side of Baltimore. The original data collection included the cross-sectional in-person interviews of 254 Black women in Baltimore.

"This study was conceptualized through a vicarious racial discrimination lens—or observing racial discrimination or violence toward other members of the Black community," said Brown, a Drexel FIRST faculty member. Brown noted that while this study focused on police violence as a form of vicarious racial discrimination, this type of discrimination is not e.