Low-income consumers' attitudes and behaviour towards access, availability and motivation to eat fruit and vegetables

Abstract

Objective: To determine low-income consumers' attitudes and behaviour towards fruit and vegetables, in particular issues of access to, affordability of and motivation to eat fruit and vegetables. Design and setting: Questionnaire survey mailed to homes owned by a large UK housing association. Participants: Participants were 680 low-income men and women, aged 17-100 years. Results: Age, employment, gender, smoking and marital status all affected attitudes towards access, affordability and motivation to eat fruit and vegetables. Few (7%) participants experienced difficulty in visiting a supermarket at least once a week, despite nearly half having no access to a car for shopping. Fruit and vegetables were affordable to this low-income group in the amounts they habitually bought; purchasing additional fruits and vegetables was seen as prohibitively expensive. Less than 5% felt they had a problem with eating healthily and yet only 18% claimed to eat the recommended 5 or more portions of fruit and vegetables every day. Conclusions: Supported by research, current UK Government policy is driven by the belief that low-income groups have difficulties in access to and affordability of fruit and vegetables. Findings from this particular group suggest that, of the three potential barriers, access and affordability were only a small part of the 'problem' surrounding low fruit and vegetable consumption. Thus, other possible determinants of greater consequence need to be identified. We suggest focusing attention on motivation to eat fruit and vegetables, since no dietary improvement can be achieved if people do not recognise there is a problem.

Associations between the purchase of healthy and fast foods and restrictions to food access: a cross-sectional study in Melbourne, Australia

“…This is in contrast with previous studies (8)(9)(10) which found that the purchase of recommended healthy foods declined with increasing food insecurity due to lack of money. This could be due to differences in the cost of these foods or the size of government allowances across the countries or cities in which these studies were conducted.…”

“…Levels of food insecurity due to lack of money have been shown to be as high as 11 % in the USA (5) , 5 % in Australia (6) and 8 % in the UK (7) . The evidence available suggests that food insecurity related to a lack of money is associated with a decline in total household food supplies and of nutritious foods such as dairy, meat, grains, fruit and vegetables (8)(9)(10) . A second indictor relates to physical limitations, such as the inability to carry groceries.…”

Rurality and dietary patterns: associations in a UK cohort study of 10-year-old children

“…Our results also suggest that access to food in terms of geographical distance to food retail outlets (as observed by Smith et al (17) ) may not be a major influence on diet quality, as we would have expected to see consistent results between poorer access in rural areas and poorer diet quality if this was the case. It is plausible that other factors associated with families who live in rural areas (such as employment and income) are perhaps more relevant than access to food (41) . The results from our adjusted analyses suggest that previous arguments claiming neighbourhood characteristics play no significant role on diet quality after individual-level characteristics have been accounted for (42)(43)(44) may not be valid.…”

Evaluation of the effectiveness of the Ministry of Food cooking programme on self-reported food consumption and confidence with cooking

“…Within the quantitative results of the current study, the male participants reported significantly greater increases in cooking confidence, whilst interviews revealed an increase in nutritional awareness, homemade cooking, enjoyment in cooking and confidence in males. The recent nationally representative UK nutrition survey also found that young people (19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) have less confidence with cooking than other age groups in the UK (17) ; therefore they have more scope for improvement. However in our study, younger people (16)(17)(18)(19) improved in confidence less than 20-64 year olds.…”