Healthy eating

Increasing Healthy Eating is Victorian health priority. Many of us are not consuming enough of the foods and drinks needed to stay healthy and too many discretionary items that are high in kilojoules, saturated fat, added sugar, salt or alcohol¹.

As a result, Victoria has one of the highest rates of overweight and obesity in the world – which is associated with many serious health conditions².

Although the statistics are alarming, the situation can be changed.

Our Healthy Eating Working Group is tackling this issue at a local level by encouraging sporting clubs, recreation centres and other settings to develop healthier canteens and kiosks. That includes working to build policies that support change at the grass roots level and/or encourage our own organisations to lead the way on healthy eating.

The Healthy Choices Nudge Trials,  where drinks fridge makeovers showed that healthy choices and business do go together, is one example of this work. 

In Victoria³:

• Discretionary foods account for 35% of kilojoule intake for adults and nearly 40% for children (DHHS 2016)
• Only one in 20 adults meet the guidelines for daily serves of vegetables and around 40% meet the guidelines for fruit (DHHS 2018a)
• Two-thirds of adults and a quarter of children are overweight or obese (ABS 2018)