Who can make us eat healthier food?

On the whole, Norwegians have gone over to healthier diets the last few years. But they are still not eating like they should.

Far from everybody is downing the Norwegian Directorate of Health’s recommended “five per day”– five portions of fruit and vegetables daily. The number of obese Norwegians has doubled since the 1980s. About half of all adults in Norway are overweight.

This means better strategies seem to be called for to get Norwegians to switch toward healthier diets. What initiatives are the most effective? Which subgroups of the citizenry should be targeted? And who should be given the main responsibility for implementing such strategies?

Marije Oostindjer of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) and a few of her colleagues asked a number of such questions to a random selection of 1,178 Norwegians.

Opinions need to sought

It turned out that most of the participants in the survey felt that everyone has a certain individual responsibility for eating more healthily. That said, two groups were given priority:

“People thought that the health officials and the food industry have chief responsibility for initiating strategies,” she says.

The media, politicians and supermarkets were given lower priorities.

Education and information

So what should the health officials and the industry do?

The participants in the study thought that the best strategy would be to intensify educational and informational efforts about diets and foodstuffs.  They thought such initiatives should be targeted in particular toward parents, schools and children.

They also thought the food industry should develop new healthy products and that advertising for unhealthy food should be limited.

They were not so eager to see this take the form of more individually tailored diets or functional foods – in other words foods developed to have special health-related qualities.

“When the product is marketed as a more healthy variation, consumers don’t expect it to be as tasty as normal food. They are also sceptical to the use of modified ingredients as this makes them feel the food is more unnatural,” says Oostindjer.

Agreeing on measures

As part of the research project, Oostindjer assembled discussion groups with representatives from the industry, research circles and representatives of pertinent interest groups. Participants in these gatherings argued that the media and politicians have a considerable responsibility for initiating strategy planning.

But all in all, the discussion groups and the individuals in the survey were in agreement on three things: They wanted the focus to be on educating and informing parents and schools, production of new healthy products and restrictions on advertising for unhealthy foods.

“This is good news. If the food sector had a completely different attitude than the consumers, we would have a problem,” says Oostindjer.

But she is not so sure how much impact can be expected from more teaching about foods in school and more general information to the public.

Changing food environment

This strategy has been tried with mixed results. The researcher points out that in some cases even comprehensive school campaigns linking educational endeavours with doling out free fruit have only resulted in tiny changes in children’s dietary habits.

“A modicum of education and knowledge about diet is definitely needed, but it is uncertain whether this alone would suffice in changing people’s habits.”

She suggests that instead of teaching kids more about food, maybe we should channel efforts more into changing the food situation at schools. This might help children to develop other eating habits and improve their dietary habits when they grow up.

Oostindjer is not so sure that raising consciousness about choices of foods always reaches those who need such awareness the most.

Put the calories further away

“Who reads the labels on food and the information about diets? It is often those who already care. Maybe we should also try ways to get people to select healthy alternatives without thinking much about it?

She points out that our actions are influenced by the environment we are in and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Experiments have shown that people serve themselves leaner plates at salad bars if they have to stretch a little further for the ingredients with the most calories. The same goes for shrinking the size of the spoons and ladles for cheese and dressings and other high-cal items.

People end up selecting a healthier mix even though they are fully free to take whatever they fancy.

Freedom of choice is a key term in the results of the survey.

It turned out that most of the people were convinced that children should not have access to unhealthy food at school. That said, the participants insisted that they want to keep the right to go for junk food and sweets if they want to.

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Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

Translated by: Glenn Ostling