- A healthy diet is essential for good health.
- Multiple factors influence people’s dietary choices, including the food environment and socioeconomic and behavioral factors.
- A recent study finds that access to grocery and fast food stores, educational level, and income affect fruit and vegetable consumption and obesity levels.
Balanced and nutritious diets are an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Researchers are still discovering what factors contribute to dietary choices.
A recent observational study published in nature communications examines various environmental factors that can affect people’s food choices.
The authors conclude that these factors have different levels of influence among different sectors of the population.
A healthy diet is essential for good health. While experts are constantly evaluating best dietary practices, there are several general components to a healthy diet.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO)A healthy diet should include the following elements:
- five servings or 400 grams (g) of fruits and vegetables daily
- legumes, nuts and whole grains
- limited amounts of fat
- limited amounts of added sugar
Different people have different food needs. It may be helpful to talk with a doctor or dietitian to develop appropriate meal plans.
healthy diets They also lower people’s risk of specific health problems, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Researchers are constantly trying to understand what factors influence people’s food choices. Then it is possible to modify these factors to guide people towards healthier food choices.
Researching dietary options can be complex; study author Tim Althoff explained to Today’s medical news:
“Studying diets is challenging and is often limited by small sample sizes, unique locations, and by people’s recall of what they ate. This has made it difficult to compare diets across the United States and has led to mixed results on the impact of the food environment.”
Multiple factors influence food choices, including cultural backgrounds and lifestyles. Environmental factors also affect people’s diets, including their access to healthy or unhealthy food options.
This study sought to examine how the following factors influenced people’s weight, their consumption of fruits and vegetables, and their consumption of fast food and soft drinks.
- access to supermarkets
- access to fast food restaurants
- Education Level
- income level
The scientists used smartphone app food logs to study food choices in a large and diverse sample. The study included 1,164,926 participants from across the US. The authors collected data for 7 years.
Tim Althoff explained the benefits of this data collection method to MNT:
“This study takes advantage of the fact that many people take detailed notes about their diets through smartphone apps. We studied 2.3 billion smartphone food records in more than 9,800 US zip codes and showed that this data can be used to study diet across the entire population.”
The authors compared their study population with nationally representative survey data. They brought together demographic and socioeconomic factors from census reporter.
In general, the scientists found that higher education levels, greater access to grocery stores, and reduced access to fast food had associations with:
- a higher intake of fruits and vegetables
- a lower intake of soft drinks and fast food
- a lower prevalence of obesity and overweight
The scientists then evaluated the impact of each of these factors among white, black, and Hispanic populations, individually. The associations varied slightly between these groups.
For example, the researchers found that higher income levels were associated with lower consumption of fruits and vegetables, higher obesity, and higher consumption of fast food among black populations.
However, they found that higher levels of education and greater access to grocery stores had associations with higher consumption of fruits and vegetables.
In contrast, higher income levels among Hispanic populations led to higher fruit and vegetable intake. Associations were weaker among white populations.
The authors describe their findings regarding access to grocery stores:
“[H]High access to grocery stores is significantly more associated with higher fruit and vegetable consumption in ZIP codes with predominantly Hispanic (7.4% difference) and Black (10.2% difference) populations in contrast with zip codes with predominantly white populations (1.7% difference). ”
Educational levels affected healthy food choices in all groups. Higher education is linked to higher consumption of fruits and vegetables and lower levels of obesity.
The study had limitations. Due to the nature of the study, the researchers were unable to determine a causal relationship between the factors they examined. The data collected was based on self-reporting via a mobile app, which may lead to inaccuracies.
The authors also acknowledge that their sample was an imperfect representation of the US population. Their sample was affected by who was most likely to use the app, typically women and people with higher income levels.
Tim Althoff pointed to MNT that “Data from smartphone apps can have serious limitations in terms of bias and quality. Our study provides ample validation that these data [correlate highly] with existing gold standard methods in the field.”
“However,” he continued, “it is much more scalable, and an exciting implication for research is that these methods could enable public health research on an unprecedented scale and granularity.”
For the future, the authors hope that scientists will conduct more longitudinal rather than cross-sectional studies and include more individual-level data.
Overall, the study indicates that improving people’s access to food and increasing education can help people make healthier food choices. But the focus of the interventions and the plan may need to change in specific subpopulations.
