Why consumers struggle with healthy eating summary
- Many consumers prioritise health yet fail to choose healthier foods
- Only a third avoid unhealthy foods despite improving dietary attitudes
- Affordability and convenience strongly limit consumers adopting healthier eating habits
- Older consumers resist major diet changes due to lifelong entrenched habits
- Industry can help by offering familiar healthier products and affordable options
The desire to eat more healthily is one of the driving forces behind innovation in the food industry. Consumers want high protein to build muscle, collagen for skin health, and fibre to improve digestion, among a myriad of other health needs.
But enthusiasm does not necessarily translate into habits. Consumers who say they want to be healthy don’t always buy healthy food.
Consumers don’t live up to their own standards on health
Europeans’ diets are getting healthier. The share of those who say that they eat an unhealthy diet, for example, has fallen from 17% in 2024 to 15% in 2025, according to research from the organisation EIT Food. In the same period, those who disagree with eating a healthy diet fell from 21% to 17%.
Nevertheless, while these metrics are going in a positive direction, only around a third of consumers avoid foods that are either unhealthy or perceived as unhealthy, such as sugary, fatty, salty, and processed foods.
Intentions and actions often do not match. More than half – 51% – of consumers say they want to eat more healthily, according to EIT Food. In Europe, health is “the number one dietary priority”, above even affordability, and is the top priority among all age groups.
What accounts for this gap between intention and action? Why don’t consumers eat healthily?
What’s stopping consumers eating healthily?
There are several constraints preventing consumers from changing their diet.
Factors such as affordability and convenience often conflict with consumer desire to eat more healthily, explains Durk Bosma, head of thought leadership at the Future of Food Institute.
Not only the cost of food, but also the time constraints within their busy lives can prevent them from fulfilling their health goals.
As well as these practical factors, the entrenched habits of consumers, especially older ones, can also prevent them from changing their diets in drastic ways.
“If you have eaten in a specific way all your life – and a lot of people have a repertoire of products or meals that they prepare – it gets difficult to change, because change means you have to rethink the whole process. Some people are open to that, but that’s mostly younger people.”
While health concerns do sometimes prompt these consumers to finally change their diets, it is often too late to make substantial changes to their health.
Ideally, healthy eating should be preventative, rather than a reaction to existing health problems, says Bosma.
What can industry do to help consumers buy healthy products?
The demand is certainly there for healthy foods – it would benefit industry to help consumers buy these products.
For older consumers, products should be introduced that are similar to those they already use in meals, Bosma suggests, so they don’t have to rethink their whole diet and only need to make small changes.
“They want to eat what they’ve been eating for the past 20 years, but make it slightly better.”
Younger people are more interested in experimenting, but they also like ready-to-eat meals. To help younger consumers eat more healthily, suggests Bosma, industry should reduce the effort required to consume healthy food, for example introducing healthier ready-to-eat products.
To make healthy food more affordable, he suggests, the industry could use similar techniques to those used to create ultra-processed foods, yet with the caveat that high amounts of salt and sugar would not be added.
Current ultra-processed foods have been developed to make them more affordable, he says. Healthy foods could be produced affordably using these processes, remaining affordable without the downsides of less healthy ultra-processed foods.
