This is the reason behind our unhealthy eating habits
Our new tool, which was launched today, affirms that we live in a world in which the odds of having an optimum diet are biased against us.
Foods that are unhealthy are easily available and heavily advertised in the world of nutrition. This is why it is easy to consume harmful food items. This also makes it difficult to make healthy choices.
Our online tool is called Australia’s Food Environment Dashboard – it provides the most accurate data available to give a picture of Australia’s food environment. It is for the very first time that we can get an exact picture of ways our environment causes us to eat too much of the wrong kinds of food.
How healthy are the Australian food systems?
Supermarkets are a major source of unhealthy foods.
Australian supermarkets are the primary environment where unhealthy foods are promoted to us.
Over half of the packaged food available in Australian stores is not healthy. In the point-of-sale display, food items that are unhealthy are promoted more frequently than healthier ones.
Read more: Supermarket price deals: the good, the bad and the ugly
Unhealthy products are also “on special” almost twice as often as healthy foods. What’s more, the discounts on unhealthy foods are much larger than the discounts on more nutritious foods.
At the checkout, it’s virtually impossible to purchase groceries without being exposed to unhealthy food items.
All this intense advertising for unhealthy foods is a contributing factor to the sick selection of food items found in our supermarket carts.
It’s not easy to ignore all the calls to purchase junk food. Shutterstock
The exposure of children to unhealthy food advertising
Australian children are not immune to unhealthy food advertising. When they journey to school as well as play and watch sports in their local community, they are subjected to a continuous bombardment of advertisements for unhealthy foods and drinks.
When people switch on the television, they’ll see double the amount of ads for unhealthy foods as healthy foods.
When kids are using their smartphones, they are bombarded with up to ten unhealthy drink and food ads every hour.
It’s more difficult in the most vulnerable areas.
Our dashboard reveals that food environments in poorer areas are more unhealthy as compared to those in more affluent areas. The price of eating a healthy diet is typically higher in low socioeconomic regions and is more expensive in remote areas of Australia.
The cost of a healthy lifestyle is not affordable (meaning it will cost over 30% of a family’s income) for those with lower incomes or who live in rural or remote regions.
People living in low socioeconomic areas are also exposed to more promotions for unhealthy food. A study in Perth, for example, found common socioeconomic areas had a significantly higher ratio of harmful food ads to healthy ads within 500m of schools compared to high socioeconomic areas.
A few good news stories
Although the majority of the major aspects of the food environment in Australia are unhealthful, there exist certain elements that are healthy.
