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In the 1960s, the Spanish diet was a typical example of the Mediterranean diet. However, in the 1990s, Spanish consumers have moved away from that pattern. This has been the result of many different changes over that period of time. It is important to know how a Mediterranean country moves from a considered healthy diet to another which is not so and the reasons behind that change. There might be a number of policy implications to reinforce food consumption habits which are not properly taken into consideration when a country goes through economic development. Nowadays, public institutions in Spain are concerned about changing diets. They provide information and encourage the appropriate education to achieve those aims. Among other things, they try to promote typical regional products of high quality as well as to avoid unhealthy food habits, by providing nutritional educational programmes at schools, jointly with other policies.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the unfolding diet transformation in East and Southern Africa is likely to influence the evolution of employment within its agrifood system (AFS) and between that system and the rest of the economy. To briefly consider implications for education and skill acquisition.

The authors link changing diets to employment structure. The authors then use alternative projections of diet change over 15- and 30-year intervals to develop scenarios on changes in employment structure.

As long as incomes in ESA continue to rise at levels near those of the past decade, the transformation of their economies is likely to advance dramatically. Key features will be: sharp decline in the share of the workforce engaged in farming even as absolute numbers rise modestly, sharp increase in the share engaged in non-farm segments of the AFS, and an even sharper increase in the share engaged outside the AFS. Within the AFS, food preparation away from home is likely to grow most rapidly, followed by food manufacturing, and finally by marketing, transport, and other AFS services. Resource booms in Mozambique and (potentially) Tanzania are the main factor that may change this pattern.

Clarifying policy implications requires renewed research given the rapid changes in Africa over the past 15 years.

This is the first paper to explicitly link changing diets to changing employment within the AFS.

It has been claimed that the British diet is still recognizably different from that of other cultures. The claim appears to be based on the fact that the structure of the main meal and its food combinations – meat, potatoes and vegetables – identify it with British culture. This study examines evidence for this claim and attempts to find a theoretical explanation for it. A historical survey of British eating habits gives some understanding of how these have been formed, and food consumption figures and market research surveys are used to indicate the distinctive features of the British meal in the 1990s. Although this evidence can only be used in a speculative manner to confirm the claim made for a distinctive form of the British meal in the 1990s the results suggest that food items associated with the British diet and in particular with the main meal are still important, and their consumption is significant compared with “foreign” items such as pasta. An explanation for this phenomenon invokes structural theory which recognizes that meals have a format that is held in place by natural and social phenomena determined by social relationships while developmental theory which allows for change accounts for the transformations in foodstuffs that have occurred within the structure. Structuralism embraces socialization and tradition that maintain continuity. Developmentalism engages materialistic factors such as technology, transport, which bring about change. The balance between these factors will determine whether or not in the next 50 years the British diet will still be recognizably British.

The chapter is an auto-ethnographic account of the self-management of a chronic illness within the context of a participatory research project on Mediterranean Diet (MD). A group of Italian women with type 2 diabetes is following a non-medical, personal interpretation of the Mediterranean-style diet. The research account is preceded by a critical appraisal of the scientific narratives of the MD.

Analysis of epidemiological research on MD examines some methodological aspects of gender blindness in its scientific approach. The ethnography concerns self-management of MD diet and redefinition of gender relations.

MD is analyzed as a case of transplantation of yesterday’s cultural and social capitals of the peasant classes, to today’s discourses on food considered as appropriate for affluent people suffering from satiety diseases. The ethnography highlights gender aspects of biographical work, examining in particular a “conversion” dietary model.

The ethnography must be amplified to include women and men from different social classes with various Mediterranean cooking habits, and family and gender patterns.

The chapter highlights cultural processes for women’s empowerment in self-managing type 2 diabetes.

This chapter may represent a seminal sociological work on chronic illness, gender and food studies in one of the “native” contexts of the Mediterranean-style diet.

The purpose of this research is to improve the understanding of drivers and inhibitors of healthy diet behaviors in the context of an emerging economy, such as Mexico, with a severe problem of overweight and obesity. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) and protection motivation theory (PMT) provided the theoretical background for this study.

A qualitative approach was used, given the limited amount of information available on consumers’ motivations to change behavior. In-depth interviews with experts in nutrition and four focus groups with consumers from two segments were performed to collect information. Thematic analysis was used to analyze information.

PMT provided a better explanation of current dietary behavior; the positive attitudes that, according to TPB, are the immediate antecedent of behavior offered a poor explanation for autoreported behaviors. Results indicate that perceived low self-efficacy and high costs prevent change of behavior. Meanwhile, low vulnerability and severity among younger consumers adds to the low intention to adopt a healthier diet. In general, sensorial attributes of products, such as texture, flavor, color, smell and appearance, prevail over nutritional attributes.

The outline of a social marketing program is suggested after the research findings. This program emphasizes prevention and is intended to complement governmental policies designed to modify the environment to facilitate access to healthy food.

Social marketing principles have been developed and applied mainly in the context of developed countries. This work contributes to the extension of such principles to an emerging economy with a public health problem related to overweight. Results of the research provide the basis to mold an appropriate intervention.

Improving the nutritious quality of diets for individuals and populations is a central goal of many public health advocates and intergovernmental organizations. Yet the outcome of healthy eating has been shown to systematically vary across individual-level socioeconomic lines, and across countries in different locations of the food system. We therefore assess variation in the association between eating nutritionally dense fresh fruits and vegetables and both self-rated health (SRH) and body mass index (BMI) across individual income and country locations in the food system.

We use nationally representative survey data from 31 countries drawn from the International Social Survey Programme’s 2011 Health module. We estimate the effect of the frequency of eating fresh fruits and vegetables using random-intercept, random-coefficient multilevel mixed-effects regression models.

We confirm that eating nutritionally dense fresh fruits and vegetables frequently associates with more positive health outcomes. However, this general conclusion masks substantial individual- and country-level heterogeneity. For both SRH and BMI, the largest beneficial associations are concentrated among the most affluent individuals in the most affluent countries. Moving away from either reduces the positive association of healthy eating.

Our results provide an important wrinkle for policies aimed at changing the nutritional quality of diets. Adjustments to diets without taking into account fundamental causes of socioeconomic status will likely be met with attenuated results.

We compare two important health outcomes across a wide variety of types of countries. We demonstrate that our main conclusions are only detectable when employing a flexible multilevel methodological design.

The purpose of this paper is to focus specifically on the benefits of using mixed methods to investigate dietary change from adolescence to adulthood exemplified using the findings from the ASH30 longitudinal study. The ASH30 study is a longitudinal dietary survey which provided quantitative evidence of dietary change and investigated factors influencing dietary change from adolescence to adulthood.

Two three‐day food diaries were collected both in 1980 (aged 11‐12 years) and 2000 (aged 31‐32 years) from the same 198 respondents in North East England. In 2,000 questionnaires were used to collect perceptions of, and attributions for, dietary change and open‐ended responses were analysed using content analysis.

The use of mixed methods brings added breadth and depth to the research which cannot be achieved by a single discipline or method. Determining what has influenced change in dietary behaviour from adolescence to adulthood is a complex and multifaceted task. Eating habits are influenced by multiple factors throughout the life course. Change in food intake between adolescence and adulthood related to life‐course events and trajectories. The qualitative findings highlighted relevant contextual information such as themes of moral panics, the concept of “convenience” and “fresh” foods.

Adopting mixed method approaches to exploring dietary change should offer a rich perspective from which to base realistic interventions.

Longitudinal dietary surveys present an opportunity to understand the complex process of dietary change throughout the life course in terms both of how diets have changed but also of why they have changed.

This paper presents a behavioral economics model with bounded rationality to describe an individual's food consumption choices that lead to weight gain and dieting. Using a physiological relationship determining calories needed to maintain weight, we simulate the food consumption choices of a representative female over a 30-year period. Results show an individual will periodically choose to diet, but that diet will reduce weight only temporarily. Recurrence of weight gain leads to cyclical dieting, which reduces the trend rate of weight increase. Dieting frequency is shown to depend on decision period length, dieting costs, and habit persistence.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of dietary transition patterns and a discussion of the food-related health issues in China.

The paper builds on a review of the existing literature on food consumption and diet changes in China, and highlights with specific attention to increasing food consumed away from home, the rising demand for fast and processed foods, and the popularizing of western-style foods in Chinese diets.

China’s food consumption patterns rapidly transitioned from one in which grains and vegetables dominated to one having more animal products and more diversification. More foods are consumed away from home and in the form of fast and processed. Income growth played and will continue to play a critical role in shifting the structure of food consumption. On the other hand, China is on a fast track from a lean population to one in which being overweight or obese. The associations between health outputs and food transitions, however, are inconclusive.

The main findings of this study have implications for better understanding the key trends and driving forces of China’s food demand system. Moreover, the results from this review are essential for food-related policymaking in many emerging economies where coexistence of undernutrition, deficiency of micronutrients and overweight and obesity is a common challenge to the society and individual households.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of qualitative approaches to add depth and insight to understanding concerning the issues involved when consumers try to make changes in their behaviour. The context of this study is people trying to make and sustain changes to their dietary behaviour. Taking Prochaska and Di Clemente's Stages of Change model as the starting point, this paper marks a departure from other work in the behavioural change area in so far as a qualitative approach is adopted rather than a quantitative perspective.

This study was longitudinal in design and the data presented concern groups of people who were categorized as belonging to stages of change and who followed a similar stage of change pattern over a period of 18 months (according to the Stage of Change algorithm described by Curry et al.).

By examining peoples' behaviour changes in depth, the similarities and differences in their attitudes and motivations are revealed in terms of their dietary behaviour change and maintenance of change. This provides a more refined understanding of how people make changes and maintain them over time.

While focusing only on a small number of people, the weaknesses of the Stages of Change model is demonstrated and how qualitative research approaches can be used to add depth and meaning to quantitative methodologies popular in the social marketing domain.

This paper demonstrates that the Stages of Change model has value in categorizing people into stages of change and measuring these changes over time but is limited in its ability to develop understanding of the lived experience of trying to change behaviour.