Research explainer|October 2026

Every spring, the International Food Information Council asks a few thousand Americans how they think about food, nutrition, and their own health. The survey has run for 21 years, which makes it one of the longest continuous records of how the country eats. The 2026 edition, fielded in March and April among 3,005 adults, contains a first, and it is a telling one.

Convenience now outranks health

Asked what influences their food purchases, Americans put taste first, as they always have, at 88 percent. Price came second at 78 percent. Then, for the first time in the survey’s history, convenience at 61 percent edged ahead of healthfulness at 56 percent.

IFIC’s own researchers do not read this as people giving up on health. They read it as a reflection of the practical trade-offs people make when time is short, budgets are tight, and priorities compete. That reading is the right one, and it is also the point. When the healthier choice costs more time or money than the convenient one, convenience wins, however much people care about their health.

Trying harder, feeling worse

The same survey shows Americans making more effort than ever. Nearly two-thirds, 64 percent, followed a specific diet or eating pattern in the past year, the highest share since IFIC began tracking the question in 2018. High-protein eating leads for the fourth year running, and seven in ten people say they actively try to include protein in their diet. Healthy aging has replaced energy as the top benefit people want from their food.

Yet only 40 percent of Americans now rate their own health as excellent or very good. That is the lowest figure since the question was first asked in 2012, and an eight-point drop in a single year. One in five describe their health as fair or poor, up from 15 percent the year before. People’s view of their own diets slipped too: the average self-rating fell nearly seven points, to 56 out of 100.

People are putting in effort. The results are not showing up where they can feel them.

Affordability splits the picture

More than eight in ten Americans noticed food prices rising over the past year. Asked, for the first time, whether food had been affordable for their household in the past month, fewer than half said yes and 30 percent said no.

The answer depends heavily on income. Fifty-seven percent of households earning $100,000 or more called food affordable. Among households earning under $50,000, it was 36 percent. And affordability tracks with health: 62 percent of people who rate their health as excellent say food is affordable, compared with 30 percent of those in fair health and 13 percent of those in poor health.

What this means for prevention

Prevention is often framed as a matter of personal discipline: eat better, move more, make healthier choices. This survey is a reminder that choices do not happen in a vacuum. They are shaped by cost, time, access, work, family responsibilities, and the food environment people move through every day. Americans are not short on intention. They are short on conditions that let intention turn into results.

• Convenience is a design problem, not a character flaw. If the fast option is also the less healthy one, the environment is doing the choosing. Schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods can change which option is fast.
• Effort without results erodes belief. When two-thirds of people follow a diet and fewer than half feel healthy, the risk is that people conclude healthy living is out of reach. Prevention has to deliver results people can feel.
• Affordability is a health measure. The income gap in food affordability is also a gap in self-reported health. Policies that make nutritious food cheaper and closer are prevention policies.

What End Chronic Disease is doing

Our work focuses on the places where the environment can be changed. In schools, End Chronic Disease sponsored California’s SB 1133, the Ready to Learn, Ready for Health Act, which brings nutrition, sleep, physical activity, stress, and screen-use instruction into the classroom, and supported AB 1264, which takes the most concerning ultra-processed foods off school menus. In the grocery aisle, we backed AB 2244, a voluntary certification seal identifying foods that are not ultra-processed, so that the healthier choice can also be the quick one to spot. Surveys like this one tell us where the gap between effort and outcome is widest, and that is where we aim.

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