Meals described as healthy or unhealthy match public health education in England

Abstract

Dietary guidelines for the general public aim to lower the incidence of nutrition-related diseases by influencing habitual food choices. Yet little is known about how well the guidelines are matched by the actual practices that people regard as healthy or unhealthy. In the present study, British residents were asked in a cognitive interview to write a description of an occasion when either they ate in an unhealthy way or the eating was healthy. The reported foods and drinks, as well as sort of occasion, location, people present and time of day, were categorised by verbal and semantic similarities. The number of mentions of terms in each category wase then contrasted between groups in exact probability tests. Perceived unhealthy and healthy eating occasions differed reliably in the sorts of foods and the contexts reported. There was also full agreement with the national guidelines on eating plenty of fruit and vegetables, eating small amounts of foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar, drinking plenty of water, and cutting down on alcohol. There was a tendency to regard choices of bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods as healthy. Reported healthy and unhealthy eating did not differ in incidences of meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein or of dairy foods and milk. These results indicate that operationally clear recommendations by health professionals are well understood in this culture but, members of the public do not make clear distinctions between healthy and unhealthy eating occasions for foods that can be included in moderate amounts in a healthy diet.

Perceived influences on episodes of (un)healthy eating

“…The presence of other people was only occasionally reported as an influence to eat either healthy or unhealthy foods. However, consistent with a previous study, eating with friends or with crowd around appeared to characterise more episodes of unhealthy eating and eating with family members characterised more episodes of healthy eating [28].…”

“…The current study extends a previous investigation on recent episodic memories that characterised foods, sort of episode, time of the day, location and people present of episodes of healthy and unhealthy eating [28]. The main contribution of the present study was the identification of perceived influences on choice of healthy and unhealthy foods that they ate.…”

“…Differences in the proportion of times that each category was counted across eating episodes between healthy and unhealthy conditions were tested using exact probability. Such quantitative analysis has been previously used for examining characteristics of eating episodes reported by people from a different culture [28].…”

Effect on weight of a homemade diet in women with overweight or obesity: A randomized controlled trial

“…However, such promotion of a healthy diet has not decreased the prevalence of obesity and other related diseases (Sanabria, 2016). Although people recognise the practices of healthy and unhealthy eating (Laguna-Camacho et al, 2018;Laguna-Camacho and Booth, 2015), the efforts to follow a healthy diet are often unsuccessful (Mann et al, 2015). This is possibly because in the modern environment the availability and promotion of unhealthy food exceeds that of healthy food (Popkin and Reardon, 2018).…”

Episodic Frequency of Energy-Dense Food Consumption in Women with Excessive Adiposity

“…People recognise well foods high in fat and sugar [19]. Therefore, a single category of EDF can include the most common fatty and sugary foods that would also represent other similar food items not covered.…”