Volume 28, Issue 4: August, 2001

Abstract

MANAGING HEALTHY EATING: DEFINITIONS, CLASSIFICATIONS, AND STRATEGIES

Laura Winter Falk, PhD, RD, Jeffery Sobal, PhD, MPH, Carole A. Bisogni, PhD, Margaret Connors, RD and Carol M. Devine, PhD, RD

This study sought to enhance understanding of how people conceptualize and manage healthy eating. An interpretivist approach employed the constant comparative method to analyze 79 open-ended interviews with individuals about food choices and eating behaviors for health-related themes. Participant reports depicted cognitive systems for defining healthy eating, where personal meanings evolved through ongoing exposure to a variety of experiential and informational sources. Participants' definitions of healthy eating clustered around seven themes for relating food and eating to their personal health. Healthy eating definitions shaped how participants categorized food and eating situations as healthy and unhealthy. Participants described healthy eating strategies that were differentially associated with various healthy eating themes. These findings provide an emic perspective of how a diverse sample of adults conceptualize and manage healthy eating. Exposing the implicit and multiplistic nature of healthy eating conceptions provides information useful to health educators promoting behavior changes.