The study found that around one in five men and women begin a new diet every month. However, from the women’s point of view, around 63 percent of them believe there is too much pressure for them to be slim. Despite this, 43 percent of women regularly shop for low-calorie food while 36 percent of men and women look for the least fattening food items while shopping.
Although seven in ten people said they wanted to improve their health, many of them said they were too busy to do so. And generally, people think there are too many contradictory messages regarding which foods are healthy.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the eternal merry go round of dieting, is a result of eating too many sweets. According to the findings, almost two-thirds of people ate sweets at least once a week and half of the mothers admitted their shopping basket was usually influenced by their children’s preferences. In other words, unhealthy.
It seems the older generation are certainly wiser, since almost three quarters of them manage to eat their ‘5 a day’. On the other hand, only a quarter of the 16 to 24 years olds can say the same thing.
Dr Emma Derbyshire, a nutritionist from Manchester Metropolitan University, who contributed to the report, said that although acknowledging calorie intake was important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of ‘good nutrition’. People often choose low calorie processed foods which aren’t always the healthiest, and often contain unacceptably high levels of salt, sugar or additives.
People have always found it a struggle to lose weight and easy to put it on. That’s why the dieting industry is so successful. But isn’t it strange that in these days where diet foods are more plentiful than ever, we’re faced with an obesity epidemic. People seem to be torn one way or the other, veering from dieting to over eating with no happy medium. Perhaps if we all just got back to the basics, we’d be a lot healthier and less obsessed with dieting.
Source: Daily Mail
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