The Food Standards Agency has published the first wave of an extensive new survey called Food and You, which reveals information about consumer behaviour and attitudes towards and knowledge of healthy eating and food safety.
The agency conducted 3,000 interviews over six months ending in August 2010 and found that and healthy eating, and their knowledge of these issues.
The survey found that 99 per cent of respondents rated eating fruit and vegetables as either very or fairly important for a healthy lifestyle. About a fifth of respondents were able to identify the types and proportions of foods needed for a healthy balanced diet, based on the government’s eat-well plate.
A high proportion of those asked in the survey - 85 per cent - identified five as the recommended number of fruit and vegetable portions. However, 65 per cent thought that a jacket potato counted towards this.
According to the survey the most commonly eaten type of food was fruit and vegetables, followed by bread, pasta, potatoes rice and other starchy foods. Some 72 per cent said they ate fruit and vegetables at least once a day. And 68 per cent said they enjoyed cooking and preparing food. More than half of those surveyed said they had made changes to their diet in the previous six months and for 28 per cent of them this meant eating more fruit and vegetables.
Andrew Wadge, FSA chief scientist, said: “Food and You was designed to help us understand what influences people’s behaviour in relation to food and to chart whether people follow government advice. Subsequent waves will enable us to assess food behaviour changes over time, which will be extremely useful to the agency as we think about the areas of our work that we need to prioritise.”
The survey, carried out by TNS-BMRB, the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) and the University of Westminster and was commissioned in 2009 before the responsibility for nutrition policy moved from the FSA to the department of health in England, and to the Assembly Government in Wales.
