Background
In Japan, a well-balanced diet consisting of cereal grains (shushoku), protein foods (shusai), and vegetables (fukusai) is recommended. However, a large proportion of people aged 20 to 49 years skip breakfast and have insufficient vegetable intake.
Objective
To comprehensively identify the factors associated with a healthy dietary habit.
Study Design, Setting, Participants
The subjects were 723 respondents (331 males, 392 females) of the 2016 Hyogo Diet Survey, aged 20 to 49 years.
Measurable Outcome/Analysis
A healthy dietary habit was defined as eating breakfast regularly, eating 5 or more vegetable dishes daily, and having a well-balanced meal at least twice daily. Factors associated with a healthy diet were defined as regular dietary practices for lifestyle disease prevention (controlling energy intake, controlling fat intake, restricting salt intake, controlling sugar intake, eating large amounts of vegetables, and eating fruit), health awareness (regular exercise, healthy weight maintenance, use of nutrition facts labels), and the habit of eating out infrequently. These variables were used to develop a hypothetical model for covariance structure analysis.
Results
The hypothetical model had acceptable goodness of fit (male: GFI = 0.962, AGFI = 0.936, CFI = 0.969, RMSEA = 0.033; female: GFI = 0.959, AGFI = 0.929, CFI = 0.962, RMSEA = 0.04). Dietary practices for lifestyle disease prevention was associated not directly, but indirectly via health awareness, with a healthy dietary habit, with standardized total effects of 0.421 in males and 0.438 in females. In males, a significant negative path from relatively high frequency of eating out to a healthy dietary habit was observed, with a standardized estimate of –0.16.
Conclusions
Acquisition of a healthy dietary habit by using dietary practices for lifestyle disease prevention is mediated by health awareness and may be negatively influenced in males by a high frequency of eating out.
Funding: None.
Appendix. Supplementary data
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Copyright
© 2020 Published by Elsevier Inc.
