#You Probably Aren’t Eating As Healthy as You Think
A new study demonstrates that American adults frequently overestimate the quality of their diet
Is your diet healthy? It seems to be an easy question, but according to recent research, it is one that most Americans fail to answer correctly.
“We found that only a small percentage of U.S. adults can accurately assess the healthfulness of their diet, and interestingly, it’s mostly those who perceive their diet as poor who are able to accurately assess their diet,” said Jessica Thomson, Ph.D., research epidemiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in the Southeast Area, the study’s lead author. “Additionally, most adults overrate the quality of their diet, sometimes to a substantial degree.”
Thomson presented findings at NUTRITION 2022 LIVE ONLINE, the flagship annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition that was held from June 14th to 16th.
Average researcher-assessed diet quality (with 100 being the highest score possible) among groups of participants who accurately rated their diet quality. For participants who accurately assessed the healthfulness of their diet, diet quality scores increased as participants’ perception of the diet increased from poor to excellent for total diet quality (total Healthy Eating Index [HEI] score) and for the vegetables, fruit, sodium, and added sugars components of the diet. However, the same increasing pattern was not present for the dairy component of the diet. Credit: Dr. Jessica Thomson, Research Epidemiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service
The goal of the study was to determine if a single, straightforward question may serve as a substitute for or addition to the comprehensive dietary questionnaires that are often used in nutrition research as a screening tool for nutrition studies. Self-rated health has been demonstrated to be a reliable indicator of morbidity and death in previous studies, but little is known about the relationship between self-rated diet quality and real diet quality.
The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a twice-yearly survey of people in the United States that is nationally representative, provided the data for the research. Participants were required to fill out comprehensive 24-hour food recall forms and evaluate their diet as excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor.
The quality of each participant’s diet was graded by researchers using the meal recall questionnaires. Fruits and vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats, dairy products with reduced fat, seafood, and plant proteins are some examples of foods that were rated as healthier. Refined grains and meals heavy in salt, added sugars, or saturated fats were among the foods thought to be less nutritious.
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