I read today in the Dominion Post of another study showing that fatty high-sugar foods are the most popular at the supermarket checkout. The difference was that this was a distinctly New Zealand study undertaken in a Wellington supermarket over a one year period.

The results will be published soon in the international journal Public Health Nutrition. You can read the abstract here.

What it showed was that the majority of the 882 people surveyed (73% being female, and with a mean age of 38 years) filled their trolleys with full-fat milk, white bread, full-sugar soft drinks and cordials, butter and sweet biscuits.

Can you believe – we are all concerned with obesity in New Zealand but national nutritional surveys are only undertaken once every ten years. The researchers who did this study used the data from shoppers who scanned their own products at Kilbirnie Pak ‘n’ Save. So since it’s relatively simple to do this shouldn’t we be doing it every year?

This of course validates my claim made in an earlier post – the contents of shopping carts that I see as I wander round the supermarket matches the findings of the survey.