ABSTRACT
Eating should be a normal, pleasurable thing to do and human beings were designed to nd pleasure in food (de Ridder, 2012). Yet nowadays, eating has become a complicated activity, with many people afraid of eating too much, too little or not healthily enough. Indeed, in developed societies healthy eating has increasing focus as a major determinant of population health and longevity. Dietary behaviours are associated with the serious health costs of heart disease, osteoporosis and other serious illnesses and obesity is a main area of concern in healthy eating discourse (Brug, 2008; Eldridge & Murcott, 2000; Wiggins, 2004). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in obesity in the developed and, increasingly, in the developing world (Finkelstein et al., 2012; Stevens et al., 2012). Indeed, the World Health Organization attests that in the past 30 years not a single country has made serious progress in the ght against obesity, and while in 1980, 857 million people worldwide were overweight or obese, by 2013 that number had more than doubled. Today, it is estimated that nearly one-third of all living people, i.e., 2.1 billion, are either overweight or obese (World Health Organization, 2014). The increase in obesity numbers spearheaded a number of interventionist public policies and healthy eating campaigns in many industrialized countries, aiming to increase consumer awareness of the importance of eating healthily (Andreasen, 2011; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014; Department of Health, 2009). Yet dietary patterns have not improved. In the United States, for example, the Produce for Better Health Foundation (2009) found that fruit and vegetable consumption dropped by 12 per cent and 6 per cent, respectively, when compared with the previous year. The World Health Organization estimates that in more than half of European countries the individual consumption of fruits and vegetables is lower than 400g per day, and in one-third of such countries the average individual intake is less than 300g per day (European Food Information Council, 2012). The European Food Safety Authority’s analysis based on national dietary surveys suggests that the recommended amount is reached in only four of the participating 11 EU Member States (European Food Information Council, 2012). In the United Kingdom, there is a signicant upward trend in household expenditure on eggs, butter, beverages, sugar and preserves (National Health Service Information Centre, 2012), yet purchases of fruits and vegetables are now respectively 11.6 per cent and 9.6 per cent lower than in 2007 (National Health Service Information Centre, 2012).
