The Psychology of Eating: From Healthy to Disordered Behavior

20 Healthy Eating

effect on the health status of the individual, the separate components of a
diet are also important in terms of causing ill health, being protective, and
also promoting better health once a diagnosis has been made. In the light
of this literature, the question “Who has a healthy diet?” has been asked.

Who Has a Healthy Diet?

Ideally there would be one international survey of food intake which
accessed a representative sample of males and females of all ages, cultures,
religions, and geographical locations and used the same definitions of
foodas a means to describe the content of people’s diet across the world.
This has not been done, and probably never will be. However, what have
been done are surveys of different age groups, in different countries, using
different measures. This overview will explore children’s diets, the healthy
eating practices of young adults, adult diets, and eating in the elderly, and
provides a series of snapshots into the diets of these different groups.
Most of the available data come from the Western hemisphere. Diets in the
developing world will also be considered with reference to malnutrition
in children.

Children’s diets

Understanding children’s diets is important not only in terms of the health
of the child but also in terms of health later on in life, as there is some
evidence that dietary habits acquired in childhood persist through to
adulthood. For example, Steptoe, Pollard, and Wardle (1995) showed that
adults prefer to eat foods that they ate as children, and longitudinal studies
of food intake such as the Minnesota Heart Study (Kelder et al., 1994)
indicated that children who select the least healthy options at baseline
continue to do so throughout the study. Further, the Bogalusa Heart Study
(Nicklas, 1995) compared the dietary intake of 10-year-olds with that of
young adults and found similarities with respect to protein, total fat, dietary
cholesterol, and sodium. There is also some evidence for the impact of child-
hood nutrition on adult health. For example, Hales et al. (1991) reported
an association between poor fetal and infant growth and impaired glucose
tolerance at age 64. Likewise, adult atherosclerosis, which begins in child-
hood (Moller et al., 1994), has been shown to relate to serum lipid levels
in the child (Newman et al., 1986; Berenson et al., 1998). Barker (e.g., 1992)