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.