Eating Well

• Poor diet and nutrition are recognised as major contributory risk factors for ill health and premature death

 

 

• Globally, nine of the top fifteen risk factors for morbidity, including high body mass index, high blood pressure, cardiac disease, diabetes and malnutrition, are associated with poor diet.
• Average intakes of saturated fat, sugar, and salt are above recommendations while intakes of fruit and vegetables, oily fish, fibre and some vitamins and minerals in some groups are below recommendations. Average intake of trans fatty acids are within recommendations.
• Sugar intake is over twice recommended level – all ages
• Data varies on the percentage of people consuming the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables. These data shown below are based on the Sport England Active Lives (AL) survey, and other surveys such as the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) or Health Survey for England (HSE) will get different results as they reach different samples of people.

Dietary factors make a substantial contribution to health inequalities. Adverse health outcomes linked to poor diet include, but are not limited to:

• dental caries,
• overweight and obesity,
• type 2 diabetes,
• cardiovascular disease
• some cancers.

Poor diets may have excess or inadequate nutrients and dietary components (such as high fat content) associated with poor health outcomes.

• It can be three times more expensive to get the energy we need from healthy foods than unhealthy foods.
• Higher rates of unhealthy weight occur in adults in places where deprivation higher
• There is also a strong association between deprivation and obesity in children.

There is no agreed definition of food insecurity or food poverty.  Researchers suggest that a household may be food insecure when the ability to acquire “adequate quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways” cannot be guaranteed.

‘Low food security’ means that the household reduces the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets.  ‘Very low food security’ means that household members sometimes disrupt eating patterns or reduce food intake because they lack money or other resources for food.

Household food insecurity may also occur when nutritious food is not available
to households because of issues with access to it from the area they live in or because of their personal circumstances.

A YouGov survey by the Food Foundation found that in April 2022, 15.5% of households were food insecure (ate less or went a day without eating because they couldn’t access or afford food). In the UK, 12.8% of people had eaten less or skipped meals, 8.8% had not eaten when they were hungry and 4.6% had gone a whole day without eating in the month to April 2022.

Food insecurity is more likely in:

• Households with children
• Households receiving Universal Credit
• Households with members with disabilities
• Households from minority ethnic groups

Health_Behaviours_in_Suffolk_-_SUMMARY.pdf (healthysuffolk.org.uk)

 

VizHub – GBD Compare (healthdata.org)

 

Public health profiles – OHID (phe.org.uk)

 

Health matters: getting every adult active every day – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

 

Health Survey England Additional Analyses, Ethnicity and Health, 2011-2019 Experimental statistics – NHS Digital

 

Part 6: Diet – NHS Digital

 

Our food and our health

 

The Sainsbury’s Living Well Index – Oxford Economics

 

NHS Confederation parliamentary briefing for Westminster Hall debate on tackling poverty and the cost of food – 01.03.2023.pdf

CBP-9209.pdf (parliament.uk)