Nearly nine in 10 people worldwide (87%) say they mostly enjoyed the food they recently ate, according to a new report investigating the relationship between people’s feelings about food and their wellbeing. However, slightly fewer people (82%) describe the food they recently ate as “mostly healthy,” and a significantly smaller share (63%) say they felt they had a lot of choices in the types of food they ate in the past seven days.
These results come from the inaugural Ando Foundation/Nissin Food Products Satisfaction With Food Enjoyment and Variety Survey, which was fielded as part of the 2022 Gallup World Poll. The survey asked people to evaluate three key aspects of the food they ate in the seven days before the interview: whether they “mostly enjoyed” their food, thought it was mostly healthy and felt like they had lots of choices in the types of food they had to eat.
A new report, Recipes for Wellbeing, reviews the major findings from these three survey questions and investigates how people’s feelings about the food they eat are related to their own sense of wellbeing, as measured by Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index.
Food Wellbeing Index Establishes Links to Overall Wellbeing
Recipes for Wellbeing introduces the Food Wellbeing Index, which assesses whether individuals are “completely satisfied” with their diet -- meaning they answer yes to all three questions, indicating that they feel their food was enjoyable, healthy and selected from a host of options. Individuals who do not answer yes to all three questions are not considered to be completely satisfied on the Food Wellbeing Index.
Globally, 55% of people are completely satisfied with the food they ate in the past seven days, while 45% are not. However, this varies considerably by region, with more than seven in 10 people classified as completely satisfied in Northern, Southern and Western Europe and in Northern America (75% and 71%, respectively), while less than half of people in the Arab States (46%), Northern Africa (42%) and sub-Saharan Africa (37%) also fall into this category.
The report details a statistically significant relationship between being completely satisfied on the Food Wellbeing Index and rating one’s current and future lives positively enough to be considered “thriving.”
Thirty-four percent of those who are completely satisfied are considered thriving, compared with 19% of people who are not completely satisfied -- a difference of 15 percentage points.
Notably, this relationship holds even when accounting for other relevant personal characteristics or attitudes, including gender, household income, age, education and country of residence.
This “thriving gap” between the two states of food wellbeing -- being completely satisfied, or not -- is essentially just as wide regardless of country income, even if the likelihood of thriving is generally greater in upper-middle-income and high-income countries. Regardless of country income status, those who are completely satisfied on the Food Wellbeing Index are at least 10 points more likely to be thriving than those who are not completely satisfied.
Implications
The inaugural Ando Foundation/Nissin Food Products Satisfaction With Food Enjoyment and Variety Survey finds that a towering percentage of people worldwide enjoy the food they eat, while a slightly smaller proportion consider their diet to be mostly healthy. Less common, though, is the feeling of having a variety of choices in the types of food one consumes.
Having a choice in the types of food one eats is important for several reasons, including that maintaining a diverse diet is a critical step toward having a healthy one. Furthermore, having a wider array of food-related choices is a necessary step to being completely satisfied on the Food Wellbeing Index, which is strongly predictive of people’s overall wellbeing.
Find out more about this new report.
To stay up to date with the latest Gallup News insights and updates, follow us on X.
For complete methodology and specific survey dates, please review Gallup's Country Data Set details.
Learn more about how the Gallup World Poll works.
