Towards a Holistic Approach to Healthy Diet: Evidence from Iranian Health Perception Study

Background: The aim of present study was to investigate the relation between the perception of population on healthy diet and lifestyle related behaviors. Methods: As part of national study on Iranian Health Perception, a cross-sectional study was carried out in Iran, 2010. A multistage sampling approach was applied to include a representative sample of population aged between 18 and 65 in the study. To collect data a designed questionnaire was administered. Results: In all 27,883 individuals (50.4% women, 48.8% men) were included in the study. The mean age of partici-pants was 34.6 years (SD = 12.8) and most were married (61%). The findings indicated that Iranian population often pay attention to healthy diet (39.5%), never smoke (74.9%), sometimes were doing exercise (29.5%), felt happy to some extent (39.5%), often care about themselves (47.1%) and rated their health as good (54.5%). Further analysis of the data showed that increased paying attention to healthy diet was associated with reduced smoking, more exercise, more self-care and happiness, and a better self-rated health status. Conclusion: The findings suggest that a healthy diet and other determinants of lifestyle are very integrated into each other. The efforts for changing any components of lifestyle can potentially change all individual related lifestyle behav-iors. Indeed, one of effective strategies in fostering healthy diet is fostering other healthy lifestyles. This holistic ap-proach might help decision-makers to design appropriate interventions in order to influence diet behaviors of people