People who are making dietary changes in an effort to lose weight may overestimate how healthy their diet is, according to a new study presented at the American Heart Association’s 2022 Scientific Sessions and described in a news release from the organization.
Losing body weight through lifestyle measures alone is generally difficult, but research suggests that it’s often possible through the right methods. In one recent study, following a low-carb vegan diet was linked to weight loss and improved blood glucose control in people with type 2 diabetes. Research also shows that any weight-loss approach for people without diabetes — through lifestyle measures, medications, or bariatric (weight-loss) surgery — is likely to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. If you have type 2 diabetes, weight loss — including by restricting calories or undergoing bariatric surgery — can support remission of your diabetes (having normal blood glucose levels without taking any glucose-lowering medications). This may be the case even if you don’t have an especially high body weight to begin with.
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For the latest study, researchers evaluated the diets of 116 adult participants who lived in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. The age of participants ranged from 35 to 58, and all of them were trying to lose weight. Participants first met one-on-one with a dietitian, and then tracked everything they ate or drank daily for one year using the Fitbit app. They also wore a Fitbit to track their physical activity and weighed themselves daily.
Based on the foods that participants reported eating, the researchers calculated a Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score for each person at the beginning and at the end of the study. The HEI was developed to measure how closely someone’s diet follows the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and has a potential score of 0 to 100, with 100 being the healthiest. It’s based on your daily intake of foods and components such as fruits and vegetables, whole and refined grains, meat, seafoods, fat, sugar, and sodium.
The participants also gave themselves healthy eating scores on a scale of 0 to 100 for the beginning and end of the study — this was done at the end of the study, so participants were being asked to look back on how healthy their diet was a year earlier. The researchers then compared participants’ self-ratings of their diet with their actual HEI based on what they reported eating.
Most overestimated the healthiness of their diets
At the end of the study, only one in four participants had what the researchers called good agreement between their perceived score and their actual HEII score — meaning a difference of six points or less. More of the remaining three out of four participants thought they were eating healthier than they actually were — with an average self-rating of 67.6, compared with an average actual HEI score of 56.4. What’s more, participants perceived their score as improving by an average of about 18 points from the beginning to the end of the study, while their actual improvement was only an average of about 1 point.
“While people generally know that fruits and vegetables are healthy, there may be a disconnect between what researchers and health care professionals consider to be a healthy and balanced diet compared to what the public thinks is a healthy and balanced diet,” said study author Jessica Cheng, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, in the news release. “Future studies should examine the effects of helping people close the gap between their perceptions and objective diet quality measurements.”
Want to learn more about eating well with diabetes? Read “Strategies for Healthy Eating,” “Improving Your Recipes: One Step at a Time,” and “What Is the Best Diet for Diabetes?”
