CSIRO statics showing the overall diet quality of Australians remains poor, indicate how hard it is to change eating behaviours, says one leading researcher.
CSIRO team leader and research scientist Gilly Hendrie told a Dairy Australia breakfast the latest Healthy Diet Score report showed people's diets had barely improved, since 2015.
The CSIRO Healthy Diet Score is an online survey, which estimates diet quality using a series of short questions.
Dr Hendrie said the most recent survey of 235,000 adults, taken between 2015-2023, found the average score had actually dropped to 53 per cent from 56pc.
"We found out the diet of Australians is fairly poor," Dr Hendrie said.
"We are meeting half of our dietary guidelines.
"The poorest performing areas are the discretionary foods (high in salt, sugar and saturated fat) - we eat two to three times more than what is recommended.
"In Australian 35-40 per cent of the daily energy intake came from discretionary food."
The CSIRO Healthy Diet Score is an online survey, which estimates diet quality using a series of short questions.
The survey assesses nine components of diet, including quantity, quality and variety of foods consumed, and estimates compliance with the Australian Dietary Guidelines to generate a score out of 100.
"I think our eating behaviours are so entrenched in our lifestyle, so it's hard to change those habitual things we do every day - a lot of things influence our food choices, the cost, the taste, the convenience," Dr Hendrie said.
"It's a difficult thing to change.
Consumption of dairy foods, healthy fats and vegetables remained the furthest from the recommended dietary guidelines."
"It's fairly stable, but with all the effort we are putting into trying to improve what people eat, I was quite hopeful it might have increased," she said.
Achieving a healthy and sustainable diet would mean eating to a person's needs, while consuming a wide variety of food, balanced across the five core groups, she said.
She told participants at the breakfast women had an average diet score of 56pc, while for men it was 53pc.
The greatest decrease in the score was reported in older adults.
The greatest difference was for vegetable consumption, with women scoring eight per cent higher than men.
But only two in five Australians were eating enough vegetables.
The diet quality of older adults was better than younger Australians, with seven points differentiating 18-50 year olds and those over 70 years (53 and 60 respectively).
Retired Australians and those working in the fitness industry had the highest average diet scores (59 out of 100), while construction workers and unemployed Australians had the lowest scores (51 out of 100).
There was a wide variety of items that could be chosen, within the five core food groups, she said.
"We don't often talk about the importance of variety of food in our diet and why this would be important to the environmental impact" she said.
"There is a real range of environmental impacts from foods, from within food groups.
"We don't want to place unnecessary demand on the production of one particular type of food."
She said just focusing on one aspect of diet "doesn't mean you have all the other ducks in a row".
That included survey respondents who ate the recommended five serves of vegetables a day and would appear to be among the healthiest Australians.
"They have the same under consumption of dairy, whole grains, legumes and saturated fats and over consumption of discretionary foods," she said.
"To change diet, its going to have to be a consistent message across a lot of different sectors, working together, making it easier for people to make healthy food purchases and supporting people to have the skills and knowledge to make it easier for people to make healthy meals at home," Dr Hendrie said.
Dietitian and food scientist Joanna McMillan told the breakfast, the issue of sustainability had been oversimplified.
"There is a real trend of plant-based eating, which is a term I don't like because I think it is very confusing for the consumer," she said.
"In our quest for sustainability, we need to make sure we don't lost sight of what is nutritious - if we lose nutrition, in our quest for sustainability, that's not going to improve the health of our nation."
She said it was not about eating less animal food and more plant-based products.
That was a very small part of the equation, in a "world of complexity."
Andrew Miller
I'm a general reporter with Stock & Land, with a special interest in irrigation issues. I completed my cadetship, with the Age, in 1980. Over my career, I've worked for ABC radio news (Mt Isa, Qld) and at provincial and suburban newspapers.
I'm a general reporter with Stock & Land, with a special interest in irrigation issues. I completed my cadetship, with the Age, in 1980. Over my career, I've worked for ABC radio news (Mt Isa, Qld) and at provincial and suburban newspapers.
