Contemporary consumers tend to practice a variety of eating habits caused by health, ethical, and sustainability issues. In particular, a versatile number of restrictive diets have become very popular in the recent past. They include vegan baking trends, vegetarian diets, gluten-free, paleo, nut exclusion, and others. These frequently observed consumer eating habits will be explored in this paper. Their particularities and reasoning will be discussed based on research findings.
There are different reasons that people use to motivate their dietary choices. According to Cruwys et al. (2020), weight loss, moral principles, and social identification are the most frequent factors influencing restricting diets. The vegetarian diet is one of the popular habits that excludes meat consumption. However, the latest trend is a vegan diet, which excludes any animal-related food, namely eggs, dairy, meat, and honey. Recent developments in science have triggered addressing nut allergies and gluten intolerance in people’s diets by choosing nut-free and gluten-free products (Zopf et al., 2018). Moreover, the paleo diet is based on the preference for products that were available in the Paleozoic era and excluded the products of farming (Zopf et al., 2018). According to this diet, people can eat lean meat, fish, nuts, fruit, and seeds, but no whole grains or dairy.
Thus, modern trends in consumer eating habits include frequent shifts to diets that eliminate a particular product for its adverse effect on health or for ethical or sustainable reasons. In such a manner, people adhere to vegetarian diets, eliminate the consumption of gluten, and exclude nuts from their nutrition. In addition, people often practice vegan and paleo diets, which are within their ethical and nutritional considerations of the benefits of an eating regimen that derives from authentic products.
References
Cruwys, T., Norwood, R., Chachay, V. S., Ntontis, E., & Sheffield, J. (2020). “An important part of who I am”: The predictors of dietary adherence among weight-loss, vegetarian, vegan, paleo, and gluten-free dietary groups. Nutrients, 12(4), 1-17.
Zopf, Y., Reljic, D., & Dieterich, W. (2018). Dietary effects on microbiota – new trends with gluten-free or Paleo diet. Medical Sciences, 6(4), 1-13.