Knowledge and attitudes towards healthy eating and physical activity:

iii. Attitudes to healthy eating
The Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) Consumer Attitudes Survey 2008 found that 87%
of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘eating healthily
is very important to me’. Healthy eating was also considered to be either ‘very
important’ or ‘fairly important’ to 75% of adults in the LIDNS 2005. These data
suggest that food, diet and healthy eating are considered to be important and
relevant by the majority of people, although it is likely that these data may be subject
to response bias.
The HSE 2007 asked adults to state how strongly they agreed with six statements
relating to their attitudes to healthy eating. Multiple responses could be selected from
a list of options. The results showed that there were differences in attitudes between
men and women. Significantly higher proportions of women than men believed that
‘healthy foods are enjoyable’ (80% and 66% respectively), and agreed that ‘I really
care about what I eat’ (74% and 64% respectively). Conversely, a significantly higher
proportion of men felt they ‘get confused over what’s supposed to be healthy and
what isn’t’ (30% of men and 24% of women) and believed ‘if you do enough exercise
you can eat whatever you like’ (20% of men and 14% of women).
The HSE 2007 also found that 37% of people believed that ‘the tastiest foods are the
ones that are bad for you’, with those with a BMI over 25 significantly more likely to
agree with this statement than those with a BMI within the healthy range. This
finding suggests that presenting healthy foods as an enjoyable option may increase
the likelihood of them being selected, particularly among those in the higher BMI
categories.
The TGI survey also asked questions about people’s attitudes towards healthy eating,
the responses to which are shown in Appendix 3, Table 2. The data show that people
who were underweight were significantly less likely to consider their diet to be very
healthy, and people who were obese were significantly more likely to consider that
they ‘should do a lot more about their health’ compared with the whole sample.
iv. Confidence in changing diet
The HSE 2007 asked respondents how easy or difficult they would find it to make
improvements to the way they eat. The majority of respondents (56.3%) believed that
making improvements to their diet would be very easy or quite easy. This response
was unaffected by weight status.
However, respondents who were obese or morbidly obese were significantly more
likely to report that they would find it difficult to make changes to their diet than
those with a healthy weight. This finding suggests that successfully identifying and
reducing barriers to change for these groups may have a positive impact on their diet.
See Appendix 3, Table 3.
v. Barriers to healthy eating
Both the HSE 2007 and the LIDNS 2005 asked questions about barriers to improving
eating habits. The HSE provided a list of 11 options including the categories
‘something else’ and ‘none of these’, from which respondents could choose all that
applied. The most commonly reported barriers to healthy eating in the HSE 2007 were
‘it’s hard to change my eating habits’ (29%), ‘I don’t have enough time’ (27%) and ‘it
costs too much’ (20%).
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