Does food planning mediate the association between living arrangements and fruit and vegetable consumption among women aged 40 years and older?

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to investigate whether food planning strategies mediate the association between living arrangements and fruit and vegetable consumption amongst women aged 40 years and over. A community sample of 473 women aged 40 years and over from metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, provided survey data on their living arrangements, education, fruit and vegetable consumption and the amount of food planning they undertake. Fruit and vegetable consumption was significantly higher amongst women who lived with others compared to those living alone. Food planning was found to mediate the association between living arrangements and fruit consumption by 8% and vegetable consumption by 13%. This study provides evidence of a mediating effect of food planning on the relationship between living arrangements and fruit and vegetable consumption. With the ageing of the population increasing the potential for a rise in the number of single-occupant households, identifying ways of helping individuals to plan their food purchasing and preparation may increase fruit and vegetable intake.

Introduction

Low intakes of fruits and vegetables are key risk factors for a range of chronic diseases (NHMRC, 2005, World Cancer Research, 2007). In many countries – for example, France, Denmark, the US as well as Australia – older people generally consume healthier diets than their younger counterparts (Guenther et al., 2006, Lau et al., 2004, Magarey et al., 2006, Perrin et al., 2002, Serdula et al., 2004), but they still tend to have low intakes of fruit and vegetables (Ball et al., 2006, Greene et al., 2008). The most recent National nutrition survey shows that only around one-third of Australian adults aged between 41 and 50 years and 35% of those aged between 51 and 64 years reported consuming the recommended 2 or more serves of fruit per day, whilst the percentage of people in these age groups who consumed the recommended 5 or more serves of vegetables per day was approximately 30–35% (Magarey et al., 2006). Furthermore only 11% of the adults were meeting the recommendations for both fruit and vegetables (Magarey et al., 2006). Since these data were collected, other studies have found similarly low intakes and the pattern is similar in other western countries (Block et al., 1999, DHS, 2005, Loughrey et al., 2001).

One factor that has been found to influence dietary quality is the living arrangements of individuals, particularly whether people live in single- or multiple-member households. Population ageing is more prevalent in developed countries such as Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006) and this may result in a considerable change in household structure in the future. The effect this may have on an individual's dietary intake is still unclear, but on the whole, the literature appears to suggest that living arrangements do influence diet, with those who live with others having better diets than those who live alone, but it does not give much insight into how or why this is so (Bae et al., 2007, Gustafsson and Sidenvall, 2002, Locher et al., 2005, Quine and Morrell, 2006).

There is some evidence to suggest that consumers who utilise food planning strategies have a better diet quality than those who buy or prepare food on impulse or with little planning (Abdel-Chany and Schrimper, 1978, Hersey et al., 2001). There are numerous planning strategies that can be employed to facilitate food shopping and food preparation. Crawford, Ball, Mishra, Salmon, and Timperio (2007) reported that women who wrote shopping lists were more inclined to eat 2 or more serves of vegetables per day. They also found that women who used other planning strategies, such as planning meals ahead of time or cooking dishes ahead of time, were twice as likely to consume more serves of vegetables (Crawford et al., 2007).

Socially constructed gender roles have resulted in women traditionally undertaking domestic duties including the planning, procurement and preparation of meals to be consumed by the family and while it has been found that men spend more hours doing domestic duties if their spouses are in the workforce, women are still more likely to be involved in the provision of food for the family (Bittman et al., 2003, Lake et al., 2006). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate whether food planning strategies mediate the association between living arrangements and fruit and vegetable consumption amongst women aged 40 years and over. It was hypothesized that, compared with women living alone, women who live with others would be more likely to employ food planning strategies and this would explain their greater fruit and vegetable consumption.