How Americans rate their diet quality

I find this pretty interesting:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB83/

Thoughts?

-Dylan

I find it interesting that apparently people realize and admit they aren't eating very well.

I thought this qoute from the article a little strange though "We find, first, that Americans have become much less likely to rate their diets as “Excellent” or “Very Good” in terms of healthfulness, even though the healthfulness of the American diet has undergone little change over this period. "

I am assuming they are comparing the 1989-91 survey to the 2005-08 survey. I agree people weren't eating very good back in 89-91 either, but I would think people were eating worse in 05-08. So I am little confused why the authors think people aren't really eating any worse, when the people themslevs think they are?

Am I reading/understanding this correctly?

I don't know I see it as two separate things. How healthy American's diets actually are and their perceptions of how healthy they are eating. I think by the early 90's the American diet was already pretty horrendous. Maybe its gotten worse sense then but I wouldn't guess by an extreme amount. Perception is interesting. More people are talking about health and concerned about their diets. Although a huge majority of these same people are still misinformed about what is healthy and are buying up low fat high protein animal products, which are even more harmful with the fat removed and the protein ratio upped. I Think there is an odd phenomenon, well odd to me because I forget how stupid and lazy the general public is. People are more informed, more conscious that their diets are unhealthy, and so they are less likely to mark in a survey that they think of their diets as healthy. This doesn't seem to have any effect on their eating habits. They know they are eating unhealthy but they don't seem to have any motivation to really change. Or even if they do they don't have enough motivation to read a book or even jump on google a few minutes to learn. They just read low fat on a label and go with that. I'm not bitter really hahaha.

Have any of you seen that movie Idiocracy? Its a pretty funny take on how humans are getting stupider and stupider and what the future will be like.

-Dylan