Your Diet Probably Isn’t as Healthy as You Think

(News)
– In these divisive times, there is at least one thing almost all Americans have in common: We are terrible at evaluating the healthiness of our own diets, at least compared to how scientists rate us. That’s according to Dr. Jessica Thomson of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in the Southeast, for daily science. Although “self-assessed health is a strong predictor of morbidity and mortality,” little data exists on whether self-assessed diet reflects reality. “We felt it was important to study whether adults can accurately assess the quality of their diet because a simple self-assessment tool can be helpful when designing nutritional interventions,” Thompson said, according to health line. “Of course, such a tool would only be useful if the insights are accurate.”

The findings suggest that those perceptions are far from accurate. Thomson and her team asked 9,700 adults to complete “detailed 24-hour diet recall questionnaires” and then rate their diets as excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor. The researchers used food recall responses to rate the participants’ diets based on the foods they ate; for example, broccoli scored high, pie scored low. Compared to the researchers’ ratings, approximately 85% of the participants “incorrectly assessed the quality of their diet” and 99% of those people overrated their diets. One group stood out from the rest: People who rated their own diets as “poor” matched the researchers’ scores 97% of the time.

More research is needed to find out how people rate the quality of their diet. People may not have a full understanding of what goes into the food they buy; Or maybe people still don’t understand what’s good for them. “Until we have a better understanding of what people consider when assessing the healthiness of their diet, it will be difficult to determine what knowledge and skills are needed to improve self-assessment or perception of diet quality,” Thomson said. she introduced her recommendations last week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition. (Read more diet stories.)