Your diet is affected by many factors. Some of these factors you may be aware of; other factors you might not be. Several factors, however, stand out in the current context of America's food and obesity crisis. Knowing the most dominant factors at work today can help you take measures to control these factors rather than letting them control you.
Culture
Traditional diets that you've inherited from a long line of ancestors can dictate what you perceive to be a "normal" diet. If you are an Indian American, for example, your diet may more closely resemble the diet of someone from Bangalore, India, rather than someone in the U.S. city of Philadelphia, where you live. However, your diet also might be influenced by the culture of the place where you live. So, you might eat cheese steaks and think it's normal to have sugary cereal for breakfast because those foods are common staples of the diet of your peers in Philadelphia.
Relationships
Your relationships can have a big influence on what you eat every day. A 2007 Harvard study published in "The New England Journal of Medicine" showed exactly how peer relationships can affect you, too. The study found weight gain could spread like a cold or flu, "infecting" friends and family out to three degrees of separation. Another study, this one published in "Appetite" in 2003, found that people tend to eat more when they eat in groups than when they eat alone. However, before you start eating alone, keep in mind that none of the factors that influence your diet exists in a vacuum; in other words, they interact with one another. So if your culture dictates that you sit at meals for several hours, but it also dictates that you only eat until 80 percent fullness as does a common cultural practice in one region of Japan, then you probably shouldn't worry that lingering is going to add inches to your waistline.
The Food Industry
As food expert Michael Pollan has written in numerous essays featured in "The New York Times Magazine," in his book, "Omnivore's Dilemma," and in numerous other writings, the food industry is not out to make people healthy. Its objective is to sell food, to maximize profit. So while the FDA has advised you with a food pyramid that tells you your diet should look a certain way, the food industry isn't necessarily interested in helping you eat according to that pyramid, because many of its products are designed to be delicious -- highly processed, refined and loaded with sugar and fat. These features make food taste better -- so we are eager to buy them -- but these features also make them worse for our health.
Access
Diet is strongly influenced by availability. Take an example of a family in Texas and a family in central India. The two families will likely have very different diets because vastly different products are available from local producers and growers and/or affordable in local stores. But even within the United States, food access issues abound. Low-income families, or families in economically disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods, often struggle to find the kinds of healthy, fresh foods that might be easily accessed in small towns or in farmers' markets in more affluent parts of the city. Even worse is that sometimes "food deserts" exist, where healthy foods are priced higher in inner city areas, because store owners calculate that people in the neighborhood won't have the means to travel to other stores to buy the healthy foods at lower prices, effectively taking advantage of a de facto monopoly on health food and making it tougher for families in these areas to eat healthily.
Price
Price often plays a role in what we can afford to put on the table. Families with low incomes often eat a large amount of fast food. It's a cheap method of delivering lots of calories. Thus, public health recommendations that advise people to eat a large number of leafy greens and fresh fruits are assuming that people can afford to pay for these fresh items, which usually cost much more than their canned equivalents; this is often not the case.
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