Episode 5: Why is changing my diet so hard?

Why is it so difficult to change the way we eat, even when we know what a healthy and sustainable diet looks like?

In this episode, hosts Adam Fogarasi and Gretchen Repasky explore why dietary change is not simply a matter of knowledge or willpower. Drawing on insights from consumer behaviour and public health research, the episode highlights how food choices are shaped by habits, routines and immediate factors such as price, convenience and taste, rather than deliberate decision-making .

The conversation examines how culture, identity and social context influence eating patterns, and why dietary recommendations that ignore these factors often fail in practice. It also explores the limitations of information-based campaigns, showing that behaviour change typically requires a combination of motivation, capability and opportunity, rather than a single intervention.

Featuring Professor Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, Aarhus University and Senior Researcher Sara Pires, Technical University of Denmark, the episode connects individual food choices with broader structural influences, including food environments, policy measures and accessibility.

At its core, the episode argues that lasting dietary change depends on realism. Rather than promoting idealised diets, effective strategies build on existing habits, cultural preferences and everyday constraints. Small, gradual adjustments—adapted to real lives—are more likely to lead to meaningful and sustained change over time.

Episode info

Guests,

Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, Centre Director of MAPP, Professor at Department of Management, Aarhus University

Sara Monteiro Pires, National Food Institute, Technical University Denmark

Hosts
Adam Fogarasi, PhD student, University of Copenhagen
Gretchen Repasky, Center Scientific Manager, Center for Protein Design, University of Copenhagen

Publisher
Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy

Audio engineering
Periscope

Producer
Adam Fogarasi
Gretchen Repasky

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome back to Healthy People, Healthy Planets, where we explore the intersection of human health, the planets, and the foods we love.

SPEAKER_05 0:13

Today we're asking a question many of us struggle with. Why is changing my diet so hard?

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Gretchen, I have seen beautifully designed diet plans that look perfect on paper. Great for health and great for the environment. But when you look at them closely, they include foods people rarely eat, don't know how to cook, or can't even buy locally. And unsurprisingly, those plants never catch on.

SPEAKER_05 0:44

Yeah, I'm not surprised either. Food isn't just fuel, it's culture and comfort and connection. You can't just swap out a traditional dish for something no one's heard of and expect people to be on board.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Exactly. Food carries identity and tradition, and changing it can feel like losing a part of yourself. Today, we look at why food habits are so deeply ingrained. The role of cultural and accessibility, and how realistic step-by-step changes can make a bigger impact than aiming for perfection. Gretchen, is food part of your identity or family and tradition?

SPEAKER_05 1:35

Absolutely, yes. When people ask me what I miss from home, food always comes to mind. But having lived in different countries with different cultures, it has changed over the years.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

That's it, exactly. Food is tied to identity, family, tradition, and culture. Changing it can feel like losing a part of yourself. Dietary recommendations that ignore local habits often fail no matter how healthy or environmentally sustainable they are. Successful public health campaigns work with existing patterns rather than against them.

SPEAKER_05 2:15

And I guess that any change has to be gradual rather than a radical overhaul.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Definitely. For example, in Denmark, you can't just tell people to eat quinoa salad and expect a smooth transition. You start by making a small adjustment. Maybe add some more vegetables to different dressing without losing the cultural anchor.

SPEAKER_05 2:39

You know, Adam, even when we want to change, life somehow just gets in the way. Let's talk about the barriers that make changing our diet so hard.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Oh, I know. Barriers can be emotional. Thing comfort eating and attachment to familiar flavors or social, family traditions, peer influence, community norms.

SPEAKER_05 3:10

Or even economic. Consider the cost of sustainable foods and the time needed for cooking. Or even practical, access to ingredients and cooking skills. Or even access to stores and the food itself. Think about food security and food deserts. Wow, there get to be a lot of questions. To find out more about these barriers, we talked with an expert.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

My name is Jessica Ascherman-Witze, and I work about consumer behavior and marketing, mostly about topics like health and sustainability. And I'm working at the MAP Center where I'm a professor and center director, and that is at Aarhus University. My work is about consumer behavior and marketing. So that's what I'm doing research about, and that is within the food system. So that is my field. And how I've become interested in that, I think that is mainly my it's somehow for my upbringing. My parents, uh especially my dad, was very much into ecology and the whole, so I was always interested in doing something about sustainability in some way or other. Um and that led me to decide to study agricultural economics at some point, and from there I got interested in consumer behavior um and economic interactions and what marketing and markets have to do with that. And that so I think that's the main reason that I'm working with sustainability is kind of my upbringing, um, that it kind of was instilled by my parents. A challenge with in food behavior and in wanting to change food behavior is that it is very complex and it it's connected to a lot of different types of motivations. So I think because people have so many different reasons for why they eat food at a certain point in time and in a certain place, that's why it's rather complex to do some changes about this. If one asks about how do people decide, I think if one would phrase a motto of how people decide for their food, you would need to use the same procedure as every year kind of motto. Because if you can think about how you make your own decisions about what you want to eat, you actually typically one goes into the kitchen, checks the fridge, kind of thinks about what do we have, what are we lacking, and what do I would I like to eat? So that is very much about what is lacking in the kitchen and what did I eat last time and what I would like to eat. So what you remember. I mean, of course, there's other aspects and habits and routines that influence how we decide. Um, but I think simply it makes a especially for something that we do so frequently and so often and with n without thinking that much about it. That's why there's so much relevance of habits for everyday food choices. But of course, there's also a lot of different other reasons. And when people ask about or talk about what are motivators or drivers of what we choose, of course, there's a lot about the pricing, the convenience, um, what and of course, and the habits and what we typically do. Of course, taste and what we like has a super high impact. Um, sometimes in those studies, people talk about oh, sustainability in Harold's is not that relevant. But of course, that's always irrelevant for people, but it's not that relevant in the moment of decision because all the other reasons are sort of more on top of mind. Um, this with price, convenience, and if you're hungry at the moment or not.

SPEAKER_05 6:41

You're listening to Healthy People, Healthy Planet.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

When people make decisions, um things like convenience and price and and um habits are so important because the first thing, the closest thing is what we experience right now and what we can inspect. So we we can see a price, we can see what is convenient. But when it's about topics like health and sustainability, it's more long-term, and and people don't cannot see that. You have to rely on somebody to you have to trust somebody that this product is more healthy and more sustainable. And because it's not here now, it's in the future. Um, we can also subconsciously always assume oh, I'm gonna eat healthy tomorrow, I'm going to choose sustainable tomorrow. Um, so what is happening in the moment where price, convenience, and and what we like becomes more important is always sort of more on the forefront. That doesn't mean that health and sustainability is not relevant for people. It's of course a big discussion because a lot of things haven't helped. I mean, most people, if you ask them what is healthy eating, they actually know it. They know eating a lot of fruit and vegetables is healthy. So people really know what is healthy eating, but people don't do it. And I think that is really that has been going on for the past decades, that people know that, but they don't do it. And a lot of those um big campaigns, information campaigns are um do not seem to work or do not seem to change enough. And the the big reason is, of course, that it's it's not about education alone, and it's also not about learning alone. When people ask about what makes a difference, one is kind of looking for a silver bullet, like one thing that can help. What has the biggest impact? Is it this, is it that? What should we do? But typically it is a combination of a lot of stuff that can change people. Um, and that is, of course, because most consumer behavior research models they talk about this there's these different driving factors. Um, for example, motivation, opportunity, capability. If there are driving factors in each of these, this together can help change behavior. So the typical answer to why doesn't why do education campaigns don't work, it's because one thing alone doesn't work. The same holds actually if you look into nudging, because often people say, okay, if education doesn't work, let's nudge people. But of course, nudging only has only has a small impact. It is much better to combine different measures because different measures and initiatives they tap into different parts of the consumer behavior factors that change. So if you provide both something for the motivation, for the capability, and for the opportunity, there's a bigger likelihood people change behavior. It's always getting back and forth between is it the individual or is it the system? And of course, to that the question is it is both, because there's both changes needed on the individual level and on the system level. And a lot of those models that are used, they actually include both parts at the same time. Because if you talk about motivation, capability, and opportunity, it means that the opportunity that is often the system around you, the choice environment. So if you want to change something about the opportunity, it could be giving people more money to buy something healthy. It can also be making it easier to actually find something healthy because if you cannot find it, you cannot buy it. So but but the it's always a big question about the individual and the um system, and the answer is both is relevant to change. Another categorization apart from motivation, opportunity, and capability is also thinking about the person, the situation, and the context. Because the person is kind of the individual, what they think. The situation can be for which kind of purposes? Because there's a difference if whether you invite for dinner or if you um eat alone in front of the TV, it's a different situation where you make different choices. And then the other is of course always the context. So the environment around you, and that is the choice environment. Um, and that also includes um social influences because um most people are not alone in their decisions, especially when it comes to food. It always hinges about on a lot of different people in your surroundings. What do other people eat, the partner's preferences, the children's preferences? And that's also what makes food choices so complicated, that there's so many different people involved with a lot of different motivations. So an individual might have a motivation to eat healthy, but of course, there's other family members who have other interests or um and and that interacts, and there's a lot of trade trade-offs involved here. From a consumer perspective, the most important thing is to combine different things that trigger different parts of what are the factors that drive behavior. So combining something that motivates with providing capability, like um learning something, and opportunity like changing the choice environment, those combinations, and maybe it doesn't matter which exact measure is taken, but as long as those measures taken provide this combination, then it leads to behavior change. And I think that is often forgotten because a lot of stakeholders or policymakers always want to look for the one bullet point. The other thing is also that this combination is also relevant because people are not equal. Some people are in a different life situation or they have different values and different interests. So it also depends on which target group that is. One of course has to adapt different measure initiatives to different target groups, but the combination of different initiatives also helps appealing to different target groups and triggering it differently. Some people are really interested in the subject, so the information helps, but some people are not interested in healthy eating, then it's more important to change the choice environment. This can be provided by giving information to people so that they're aware of something, being healthy, for example. The opportunity is providing the accessibility and affordability of those foods that can be changing prices, um, making it easier that this uh for the retailers to put things on shelves. And then the capability, this is about um, for example, initiatives that help people teach something. So if you in the school um employ more um um uh cooking classes for for kids, um, or you provide recipes on products, this helps people to increase um those capabilities. And I think um also in the discussions that there is often about nudging, which is about changing the choice environment, the aspects that is then forgotten when one talks a lot about nudging, which can be a super helpful initiative because it changes a lot of people's choices, only very small, but on a big population that can have a big impact. What is sometimes forgotten when one talks about nudging is that of course the experience and the learning curve that happens when you actually realize that you achieve something and you have a positive experience with that, that helps much more to put things into new habits and new practices. Because nudging doesn't necessarily change the habits, it can, because if you see yourself doing something different, you start thinking I'm someone different. So this can also help. But but it's also really important to include some learning elements so that people change habits and mindsets over the long term. There's two things that that I really think is important to remember as an individual. One one thing is that this self-nutging that a lot of people um automatically do in their homes. So if you have chocolates at home and you um put them in a very um place far away, you won't necessarily get up and go those 20 meters while you watch TV. So people nudge themselves to eat healthier and they invent those ideas. And being aware of the self-nudching and employ more of these is a helpful thing at in home. The other thing is, of course, when you that it's I think it's really good to observe oneself and see what works. Because we shouldn't sort of punish ourselves for not being disciplined enough. We should rather look for the things that work for us. Um, if you enjoy a certain healthy food, then simply sort of buy that healthy food and not the others that you don't enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

So, to recap, our food choices are largely driven by habits, routines, and immediate factors like price, convenience, and taste, rather than deliberate decisions.

SPEAKER_05 15:45

Jessica explained that simply giving people information isn't going to be enough to change their behavior. Instead, change happens when multiple factors like motivation, capability, and opportunity all can come together.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

And importantly, food choices are shaped by the broader context, including social situations and the environment around us.

SPEAKER_05 16:18

So Adam, it seems like improving diets isn't just about knowledge, but it's about making better choices easier in our everyday lives. So, Adam, how about some realistic or step-by-step recommendations that will work when I'm trying to change my diet?

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Well, first, work with cultural dishes, not against them. Target the most impactful and feasible changes. Look for clear, simple cooking ideas for unfamiliar foods, and set short-term, achievable goals that build towards a bigger change. In public health nutrition, we sometimes talk about low-hanging fruit. Changes that are easy for people to adapt and make a big difference. That might be adding one vegetable to a meal they already love, or switching to a more sustainable protein for one dinner a week.

SPEAKER_05 17:22

But it's still hard because we're often alone in making these changes. Is there something that a public health organization can do to help? We talked with an expert to find out. Let's turn next to Sarah Pyers, an expert on food safety, nutrition, and how we balance risks and benefits in our diets.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

We want our diets to be healthy and we want our diets to be safe. Some of these aspects we as consumers can have more of a handle on, so we can make choices to make sure that our diets are as healthy as possible, as well as enjoyable and culturally appropriate, but we need information to make those choices. From a food safety perspective, the expectation is that the food that we have access to is safe or as safe as possible. And there the consumer has less power to influence safety. There are some things we can do, for example, cooking our foods properly or making choices that we would think that have a lower chance of being contaminated, but it's less under our control. One big obstacle is, as you mentioned, tradition, culture are just habits. So changing the way we eat from the way we've been traditionally eating for many years might be challenging. But I think another big challenge is also on one hand, information. So maybe some of us are more informed, more knowledgeable about possible impacts in our foods, but then also influences that we are not necessarily very aware of, but that they do influence our daily choices. So food accessibility or food environments, um, so how exposed we are, how easy it is to get certain types of foods as opposed to others. So all these factors, in my view, influence our daily choices.

SPEAKER_05 19:49

You're listening to Healthy People, Healthy Planet. Let's return now to our expert.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

I think the solutions and the policies are probably very linked, right? Because we really, even for the sake of justice and equality, we need to ensure that it's our policymakers that are driving these transitions. Um, so not only for the very informed part of the population. I think policymakers have a huge role because there's so many different types of policies that will have a direct or indirect impact in how people are eating, including, for example, food environments. So there's regulations around that that are possible, taxation, so making some of the foods more expensive than others, um, that that has been shown to have a very big impact, but also guidance to the consumers and education. And the latter, so these recommendations to consumers, they are context-specific recommendations, so recommendations that are adapted to different types of populations and settings, they're very powerful. We can look at what we would recommend any person in the world to eat, but then try to adapt that to more local contexts. And there we can embed the tradition to the cultural habits, but also the food safety perspective, because maybe some foods are safer in other countries than others, and so we can also adjust those perspectives. So, for example, sugary foods and um and drinks. So that would be one example. Reformulation, food reformulation, I think might also have a very big impact. So reformulation, um, I think reformulation, which is regulated, so a guidance by policymakers to industries that then would uh enforce reduction, for example, changing the Way foods are produced. So let's say you have cereal, so it's a food that is highly consumed by young children, and you would regulate the reduction of the content of sugar. This could also apply to salt. So regulating the content of salt in different types of products that are highly consumed by populations. So risk and benefit, they would mean the same thing, but in opposite directions. So risk is the likelihood that when we as consumers consume a specific food, end up having a negative health effect. So some kind of disease that is associated with that food. So let's say consuming red meat or processed meats might increase our risk of some certain type of cancer. Or consuming a food that might be contaminated with pathogens, so for example, eggs with salmonella might increase our risk of having gastroenteritis. That's a risk. The benefit is the other side of the coin. So what's the likelihood that by eating more fruits and vegetables, for example, we would have beneficial health effects? So preventing cardiovascular disease, for example, or other type of diseases. That would be a benefit. So for example, we recommend our population to eat more fish. Fish has a lot of health benefits. It has the good fatty acids that are good for preventing cardiovascular disease or for good intellectual health or in young children. So this is a food that we encourage the population to eat. But then on the other hand, certain types of fish can also be contaminated with heavy metals like methyl mercury. And that has negative health effects. So how do we know what to do when we know that a food can both be beneficial but also cause adverse health effects? And this is the same food. So risk-benefit assessment allows us to understand what would be the amount of this specific food that the population should eat while we're having the maximum benefits possible while minimizing the possible adverse health effects. So this is useful already when we look into one specific food, but let's say we want to encourage the population to reduce one food, let's say an animal-based product that could have a health or environmental negative impact, and then increase the other. How can we understand which type of substitutions or food replacements are better for our health? There we can use the same type of approach and consider risks and benefits.

SPEAKER_05 25:10

You're listening to Healthy People Healthy Planet.

SPEAKER_02 25:15

We want to make sure that we're encouraging people to make healthier choices, but also safe choices. Or we want to make sure that the choices that we're suggesting are actually healthy for everyone. And that means that we need to look into the diverse, the various types of health effects for many different people, considering nutrients and health and as well as food safety. Our policymakers, so for example, at the national level, are requesting us or looking at the results for risk-benefit assessments to adjust their dietary recommendations. So this is happening already in Denmark and in some other countries. So we'll make sure that these are included. And also the WHO has recently started an expert group to complement the group that is providing global dietary guidelines in terms of consumption of, for example, animal-sourced foods, and then plugging in with a risk-benefit assessment approach to make sure that at the local level, these diets or these recommendations are also safe and are healthy in all ways. So using specifically risk-benefit assessment. And the WHO is actually connecting these with a group that will look into the environmental impact. So it's a very exciting perspective ahead.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

Balancing both health and safety can make data recommendations more precise and realistic.

SPEAKER_05 27:28

So we really need both good evidence and the right systems to support change. Tip one, start small. Change one meal or one ingredient at a time. Tip two, make it familiar. Adapt existing recipes rather than replacing them entirely. And tip three, plan ahead. Keep staple ingredients for healthy and sustainable meals ready to go.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

It's definitely the second approach that works every time because it feels possible.

SPEAKER_05 28:41

So changing our diet is hard because it's about much more than food. It's about habits, culture, and identity.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

But when we respect those connections and start small, change becomes not only possible, but lasting.

SPEAKER_05 28:59

Adam, do you think that tradition, health, and a sustainable environment can actually come together? Can they really align?

SPEAKER_01 29:08

I sure do, Gretchen. And next time we will find out how tradition and innovation can actually work together for a healthier and more environmentally sustainable future. This episode of Healthy People, Healthy Planet was written, hosted, and produced by me, Adam Fogaresi.

SPEAKER_05 29:28

And me, Gretchen Rapaski. Audio engineering by Periscope with support from the Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review and be sure to get in touch. Our email is in the show notes. Thanks for listening.