Food choice and smoking behavior : a crossroads in the youth

Biological, emotional, cognitive, and social factors contribute in determining a given nutritional style. However, recent investigations have highlighted the role of family in determining the dietary habits and health-related choices. Hence, it is possible to infer, with an acceptable margin of error, that the within-family learning is able to strongly affect the health-related choices of children and adolescents, creating or influencing health beliefs, lifestyles and the future mental models that they will use to develop preferences (such as foods) and a certain lifestyle. What is true for dietary habits, it is also valid for other behaviour, such as smoking. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between parenting style, lifestyle and early smoking. Diet and smoking are related to each other and this will lead, particularly in adolescence, to the development of a set of mental models and behaviours that will characterize the adult lifestyle. Mental and behavioural models developed in adolescence represent strong points, difficult to change in the future with respect to habits later developed. At the moment few studies have focused on the relationship between smoking, diet and lifestyle in adolescence. We claim that nutrition style and smoking habit should be regarded as the two sides of the same coin to be studied jointly. However, the comphrension of the relationship between the different factors giving rise to unhealthy lifestyle need further research, in particular with the aim to help experts to design new approaches in order to improve the health of the future society