14 DAY TRIAL // What you eat may be biased by what you earn, personal opinions and practices.
But a team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has shown that race and gender also affect people's food choices.
All these factors are also influenced by environmental factors, like reliance on fast food, food advertising and food pricing, and on personal factors, such as taste, palatability, convenience and health benefits.
The research investigated 4,356 U.S. subjects 20-65 years old from two nationally representative surveys made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Diet and Health Knowledge Survey.
The team focused on the diet quality indicators, like energy amount, energy density, total fat and saturated fat; fruits and vegetables intake, fiber, calcium and dairy products consumed. Diet was found to be strongly influenced by race and sex, associated with socio-economic status, perceived barrier of food price and perceived benefit of diet quality.
Lower income led to a poorer quality diet.
African-Americans with lower incomes perceived food price as more important when acquiring food than White counterparts. White people of lower socio-economic status had a diet richer in fat and saturated fat while in African-Americans fat intake was not connected to income level.
The perceived barrier of food price increased sodium intake while decreasing fiber intake. The perceived benefit of diet quality led to improved nutrition, including less saturated fat and more fiber, fruits and vegetables.
Women were more preoccupied by food guidelines in order to improve their health than men were. Women presented a diet with lower energy, energy density, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium intake than men. But as men eat more, they presented higher intake of fruits and vegetables, fiber, calcium and dairy products. "Low socio-economic status may cause a significant food-cost barrier, which in turn, reduces the quality of an individual's diet. Considering the growing obesity crisis, it is important to make healthy foods accessible to poor segments of the population and to empower them to eat a healthy diet by lowering the price of healthy foods and enhancing tailored nutrition education," said Dr. Youfa Wang, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the Bloomberg School.
"Programs that promote positive attitudes towards the benefits of healthy diets can improve diet quality for both genders and all ethnicities."
"People's diets are affected by many factors. We examined some of those factors. Therefore, a large proportion of the association between income level and dietary intake could not be explained by the perceived barrier of food price or the perceived benefit of diet quality," added May A. Beydoun, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Bloomberg School.