Shop Receipts Confirm
Britons Love Fatty Foods

LONDON (Reuters Health) - Britons are continuing to eat too many fatty foods despite having one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world, a study of supermarket till receipts showed on Thursday.

The novel probe into eating habits found that, on average, households get 35.9% of their energy from fat, the Medical Research Council (MRC) said.

That is 2.9% above the recommended levels set by the Department of Health.

The 2-year study was carried out by the Public Health Nutrition Unit and Nutrition Epidemiology Group at the University of Leeds in the north of England. The findings are published in the December issue of Public Health Nutrition.

The MRC said in a news release that researchers studied 28 days' worth of till receipts of 284 people in Leeds who said they spent at least 60% of their food bill at Tesco and at other supermarkets. Each member of the household also kept a 4-day food diary. All the food eaten at home was weighed and meals eaten elsewhere were recorded and used in the analysis.

``This pilot study found that there is a strong relationship between the amount of energy and fat purchased from supermarkets and the amount consumed. Therefore, the use of till receipts could be a novel, inexpensive and effective way of evaluating household food consumption,'' the MRC said.

``In the future, it is hoped that the analysis of receipts can be used to indicate the nutritional intake of individuals and specific groups in society and examine diet-disease relationships between different geographical regions and countries.

``Advances in scanning technology could lead to the development of a 'fat tally' of the foods in their trolley and this could be shown on a graph on the receipt, plotted against the UK recommended levels of energy from fat,'' the group stated.

Joan Ransley, director of the Public Health Nutrition Unit, who led the research project, said, ``Over 90% of our food is bought from supermarkets so till receipts can tell us lots of information about the levels of fat and energy households may be consuming. Our research indicates that supermarkets could play a role in helping us reduce the amount of fat in our diets.'

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".