Food Choices of Young Adults in the United States of America: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Understanding food choice is critical to developing effective health promotion efforts to counter the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States. Although physiologic, environmental, and social factors influence the development of health conditions, routine decisions, such as food choice, also contribute substantially over time. Behavioral scientists believe that these routine decisions represent a key opportunity to improve population health. We conducted a scoping review of both health and business literature to identify themes in the food choices of young adults aged 19-24 y in the United States. Informed by the Joanna Briggs Institute processes for scoping reviews, we conducted a structured search of 8 health and business databases on

Demographic, Behavioural and Anthropometric Correlates of Food Liking: A Cross-sectional Analysis of Young Adults

“…As over 50% of young Australian adults aged 18–30 years are overweight or obese [ 1 ], poor diet is considered the leading risk factor for disease in this age group [ 2 , 3 ]. To improve the diet and health of young adults, it is first necessary to understand the influences on their food choice [ 4 ]. Within the framework described by Furst et al [ 5 ], life course influences, such as personal and social influences, and value negotiations, such as sensory perceptions and health and nutrition, shape food choice and intake.…”

“…Young adulthood is a life stage characterized by life transitions, including becoming responsible for food purchasing and preparation [ 4 ]. The transition to university has been shown to negatively impact on food choices, particularly among those who live away from home [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]; thus, these changes may disproportionately influence the relationship between food liking and food intake.…”

“…fruits, vegetables and discretionary foods) and overall diet quality [ 9 ]. Prior to implementing and translating food liking scores for assessing diet–disease relationships in young adults, a broader understanding of the correlates of liking for specific food groups is needed [ 4 ]. Moreover, the relationship between liking specific food groups and a broad range of university-based young adult demographics and health behaviours, such as living situation, indicators of socio-economic status and food literacy behaviours, is unclear.…”

Assessing diet in a university student population: a longitudinal food card transaction data approach

“…A scoping review of food choice amongst young adults in the USA identified similar general patterns, highlighting that snacking, rather than consuming three meals, is a popular behaviour in this age group, as observed in our Snackers and Grab-and-Go patterns. Additionally they observe that 'healthy' food items can be a driver of food choice in some, which we can see in the Vegetarian and Dieters clusters (35) .…”

A Review of Purchasing Preferences for Margarine among Hungarian and International Students

“…In compliance with the methodology of the discrete choice experiment, this was preceded by a qualitative procedure (focus group interviews with two groups of Hungarian and two groups of international students with eight participants by each group in September 2019). We chose students in higher education as a target group since they had been found to have extremely disparate divergent behaviour in terms of health awareness in several studies (Yahia et al, 2008;Al-Rethaiaa et al, 2010;Abraham et al, 2018;Kyrkou et al, 2018;Sogari et al, 2018;Alkazemi, 2019;Powell et al, 2019). By supplementing the results of the focus group interviews with knowledge gained from the literature, we defined the product attributes to be examined in the research.…”