Forty percent of high school students report binge eating in new CDC survey. Really!

Is this perhaps not fairly normal for adolescence? I remember having had very short episodes of binge eating & drinking in my teenage years.

However, binge eating can be a risk factor for couch potatoes or kids having a sedentary lifestyle.

How was binge eating defined? Is maybe something wrong with the definition?

Did the teenagers perhaps think binge is a cool word?

Notice that females have a higher binge eating prevalence, which has been observed for several decades.

"Forty percent of high school students report binge eating in new CDC survey "

"About 40% of high school students reported binge eating in the past month in a large new government survey, putting a spotlight on how widespread this common form of disordered eating is among young people in the U.S. 

This is the first time the biennial survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has asked about binge eating, and the first data on disordered eating collected by the Youth Risk Behavior Survey in a decade. Among its other striking findings: 17% of nearly 7,000 students said they had engaged in binge eating within the last three days.   ..."

Here is the text of the survey question: "During the past 30 days, on how many days did you eat an unusually large amount of food in a short period of time and experience a loss of control over how much you were eating or a feeling that you could not stop eating even when full?"

What is a loss of control in this context?

"Results

In weighted analyses, 59.5% of students reported 0 days

of binge eating, indicating that 40.5% of students reported

binge eating on at least 1 day in the past 30 days (Table 2). In

addition, 17.2% of students reported binge eating on ≥3 days

(Table 3). Female students had a higher prevalence of reporting

binge eating on ≥3 days compared with male students (18.6%

versus 15.9%) ..."

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Forty percent of high school students report binge eating in new CDC survey (behind paywall) "The data also show binge eating is more prevalent among young people of color"

Findings From the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2015–2025

Prevalence of Binge Eating Behavior Among High School Students and Associations with Social Media Use, Mental Health, and Suicide Risk — Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2025 (a supplement)

The numbers in the table below seem to be high! That up to roughly 35% of teenagers are binge eating about every three days seems to be extreme perhaps indicating that something is wrong with the survey.