Healthy, Vague

Abstract

Given public health priorities to improve people’s diets, an accurate understanding of what influences food choice is fundamental. Yet “food choice” is a highly complex, personal process, in which health may be more or less of a priority depending on the person. Guidance on how to eat a healthy diet should be personalized. A cross-disciplinary lens is used to explore how the experiences and priorities of individuals intersect with what they understand to be true regarding food and health to produce decisions about what to eat. During in-depth interviews conducted with twenty-five health-conscious adults, the term “healthy” itself proved to be elastic, encompassing foods that are nutritionally healthy and foods that simply fit into the course of our own lives and experiences, including foods perceived as enjoyable regardless of nutritional value.

Keywords:

• food choice
• healthy food
• grounded theory
• good food

Notes

1. In the Nutrition field, the 24-hour Dietary recall intervention is commonly used both as an intensive method of assessment for nutrition studies and as a comparison method for validation/calibration studies of structured assessments. Individuals are interviewed about foods, beverages and their quantities during the previous twenty-four hours. This information draws on national food and nutrient databases to estimate a person’s quantified nutrient intake. A single twenty-four-hour recall is not considered to be representative of habitual diet at an individual level but is adequate for surveying intake in a large group and estimating group mean intake.