Healthy Eating
Healthy eating is integral to our overall health and wellbeing. Wyndham has a larger proportion of residents who are not meeting the food and beverage recommendations to achieve long term good health. This profile compares Wyndham adults to adults across Greater Melbourne and Victoria on eating and drinking habits, as well as food insecurity. All data refers to adults aged 18+ years unless otherwise stated.
There is a smaller proportion of adults consuming the recommended servings of fruit and vegetables each day in Wyndham than Victoria wide.
As shown in the graph below, only 3.9% of Wyndham adults are consuming the recommended 5 serves of vegetables each day, compared to 4.6% for Western Melbourne and 5.4% Victoria. This a remarkably small proportion of people.
Significantly more adults consume the recommended 2 serves of fruit each day across all regions, though the proportion is still less than half the population and is lower in Wyndham (36.6%) than in the West Metropolitan area (43.6%), and Victoria (43.2%).
Fruit and vegetable consumption, Wyndham, Western Metropolitan Melbourne, Victoria 20171
The proportion of people over 15 years of age in Wyndham who out of money to buy food in last 12 months.2
People who ran out of money to buy food in last 12 months, 2020
As shown in the graph below, a higher proportion of Wyndham adults consumed sugary drinks daily in 2017 (15.8%) compared to adults across Western Melbourne (10.8%) and Victoria (10.1%). Over consumption of sugar sweetened beverages are a significant contributor to obesity and type 2 diabetes and can seriously affect future health and wellbeing.
Daily consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks, Wyndham, Western Metropolitan Melbourne and Victoria 20174
The following chart displays how often people eat a takeaway meal or snack during one week. Overall, most people consume at least one of these meals or snacks per week with Wyndham (70.0%) have a higher rate than both Western Melbourne (66.5%) and Victoria (69.1%).
A large majority of the available takeaway meals tend to be high in both fat and sugar. Over reliance on this type of food can lead to people becoming overweight and obese which in turn leads to poorer health outcomes such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Heart disease for the second highest number of deaths per year in Australia, second only to cancer (Australian Burden of Disease Study 2015, AIHW, 2018). Type 2 diabetes affects over one million Australians and is an underlying cause of death in 1 in 10 people. Both diseases are largely preventable and are due mainly to lifestyle factors such as poor diet and lack of exercise.
