HHS HealthBeat (May 7, 2012)

You are what you eat

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Nicholas Garlow with HHS HealthBeat.

Think about what you eat. Think about how much of it you eat, and how often. Twenty-thousand participants did just that, and researchers were able to make food patterns of it, based on demographics.

Suzanne Judd is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“The first pattern, we called it traditional in the abstract. It’s made of people that have mixed meals – Chinese food, Mexican food, pizza, pasta. And if you look at the mean age, it tends to be younger.”

Some diet patterns can give us bad habits; for instance, a sweet tooth, or a craving for take-out, or the more than occasional happy hour drink.

“Consuming that much processed and sweet food is a little bit alarming. One would think that’s probably not going to be a good thing.”

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at healthfinder.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Nicholas Garlow.

Last revised: May 7, 2012