Attitudes to fat and fat consumption and sharing of dietary advice : A comparison between healthcare professionals and non-health professionals

Sammanfattning: Background One of the challenges to public health in Sweden is the consumption of excessive saturated fat and too little unsaturated fat. The National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW), the Swedish National Food Agency (SNFA) and the health sector work together to tackle such challenges, through educating the public on healthy dietary habits. The SNFA provides guidelines for all nutritional information but some of the guidelines have often been questioned leading to uncertainty and differing attitudes towards the consumption of fat in particular. Aims The study’s aim was to compare healthcare professionals’ attitudes to dietary fat and fat consumption to those of non-health professionals. A further aim was to assess if the named two groups gave advice on dietary habits. Method An online questionnaire survey was carried out with the participation of 260 adults recruited through convenience sampling. The questionnaire comprised 13 questions and the data collected were compiled in Microsoft Excel then imported to IBM SPSS 20.0., for processing and analysis. Results were analyzed using chi-square tests with p<0.05. Results A total of 73 healthcare professionals and 187 non-health professionals took part in the study.  Significantly more healthcare professionals than non-health professionals knew and were positive to established dietary advice regarding fat. There were however no differences between the two groups in the consumption of hard dietary fats. Both groups gave advice on dietary habits. Conclusions Healthcare professionals can be perceived as more knowledgeable than non-health professionals on fat consumption. The sharing of dietary advice by healthcare professionals may therefore lead to positive developments regarding those dietary guidelines that have often been questioned. This however requires that the healthcare professionals act professionally and separate what they do in private from what they advise their patients.