Overcoming barriers to healthy living

Barriers to healthy eating

The London Met dietician students shared their thoughts about the main barriers to healthier eating.

Lack of time

Working full time, there can be limited time to cook and as a result many people will regularly opt for takeaways or ready meals. These can be high in salt, fat and calories and low in other nutrients.  If eaten often, they can increase the risk of health problems like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Fear of trying out healthy cooking

Healthy cooking needn’t be difficult or time consuming. People often think that it’s complicated to cook a meal from scratch and that they might fail when they try.  However, that’s not necessarily the case. There are lots of simple, tasty recipes that are also healthy and easy to prepare.

Fresh food is perceived to be less affordable

There is a big socio-economic divide in terms of the knowledge about healthy eating, access to healthy food and how much people can afford.

If you have a limited amount of money at any one time, it can harder to buy small amounts of all the different food groups that you need to cook a meal from scratch rather than buying a ready meal with all the food groups in one. 

Things like fresh fruit can be expensive and it’s a lot of money to be throwing away if it goes off.  However, many people don’t realise that frozen fruit and tinned fruit still counts as one of the five recommended portions of fruit and veg a day.

Language barriers

Too often the right information about how to manage a health condition is complicated and not easy to understand, particularly if English is not your first language. There is information translated into different languages on the Diabetes UK site and British Heart Foundation.

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