Have you ever thought why it is not so easy to change your daily eating habits to a better healthy diet? For you eating fruit and vegetables is a normal and enjoyable habit or you have to be pushed to do it from others?
When I decided to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) I wanted to answer all these research questions and address the problem of diet-related health disorders caused by unhealthy and overconsumption of food. During my MSCA Global Fellowship “CONSUMEHealth. Using consumer science to improve healthy eating habits”, I will focus on understanding how to help people eating healthy and give suggestions about good practices for a daily healthy life.
This becomes important because today we can see that also in the Mediterranean countries, overweight, obesity and other chronic diet-related diseases among children and teenager are increasing. One of the reasons is the low consumption of vegetables and fruit compared to the past decades.
One recent work carried out by the Agricultural Economics unit of the University of Parma, with Prof. Davide Menozzi as the head researcher, is about understanding the main determinants of vegetable consumption among young adults.
We have conducted a cross-sectional study on a sample of Italian students (n=751), using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a conceptual framework. One of the main interesting findings is that vegetable consumption may be intentional as well as habitual, depending on the level of habit strengths. Interventions to people with low habit should highlight favorable opinions of friends, family, and doctors about vegetable consumption. If you want to find out more you can read the whole paper, published in the Journal LWT - Food Science and Technology, on this link:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643817300919