Diet, health and personal preferences of body types.

Authors Avatar

Mark Austen                Food Technology                                             Centre Number: 51515

Biography

The computer programs which were used in my food technology project were:

Microsoft word – This is where I completed all my write up

Microsoft excel – This is where my graphs were produced

Internet explorer- From here I accessed the internet where I managed to do a vast majority of my research

Recipe calc – From here I managed to calculate the nutritional information of my recipes

Paint – In this program I designed my packaging

Smart draw – I used this program to design my flow charts

Introduction

Before I start this project I need to perform an awful lot of research to help me make my mind up about certain things.

Here are the methods that I shall use to do my research

Questionnaire                                                                                

Internet

Picking up recipe’s from shops

E-Mail

Primary Research        

For my food technology coursework I sent out 30 questionnaires asking people questions about their diet, their health and their personal preferences of body types. Asking people questions and about their health is important so I can get an idea of what most people’s health is like. I also asked what types of body image people prefer and what people find most attractive.

I sent out fifteen questionnaires to male, and another fifteen to females. The reason for this is so I would get a better range of results. I also asked three different age groups, the groups were, “teenagers”, “Middle aged people” (people aged between thirty and forty) and “elderly people” (60+). I needed to send my questionnaire out to different age groups and genders because different people share different views. For example the elderly might have a completely different view on being overweight than younger people. The elderly might not be anywhere near as concerned as younger people are.

Here is a sample of the questionnaire I sent out

 

Here are graphs showing the average percentage of people from each group that eats breakfast:

 

As you can clearly see, it is teenagers who have been on diets’ the most, this is because teenagers are much more concerned about their appearance than older people. When I asked some middle-aged people why they went onto diets, the most common reason was to improve their health and not their appearance. Hardly any of the elderly people went onto diets, this is because most elderly people have completely different views about people’s appearance to younger people, and elderly people generally would not try to improve their health because they will not be alive for very long.

The final question I have decided to analyse is this one:

Join now!

Would you consider yourself to be healthy?

Yes          No

Knowing whether or not people think that they are healthy or not is very important when designing a low fat product, because if everyone thinks that they are healthy they will not see the benefit of spending money on low fat products.

Here are my results for the different age groups:

From this I can conclude that teenager think that they are the least healthy, and the elderly think they are healthy.

I have found ...

This is a preview of the whole essay