2 - Health Behaviours and Healthy Eating Interventions

Summary

Over the past decades, there has been an upsurge of interest in health and health behaviours. More precisely, this interest and efforts to change health behaviours emerged from the mid twentieth century onwards (Armstrong, 2009). Health behaviours (or health-related behaviour) have been defined as ‘personal attributes such as beliefs, expectations, motives, values, perceptions, and other cognitive elements; personality characteristics including affective and emotional states and traits and overt behaviour patterns, actions, and habits that relate to health maintenance, to health restoration, and health improvement’ (Gochman, 1997, p. 3). This means that not only observable, overt actions but also mental events and emotional states can be reported and measured. Health behaviours include a set of actions related to nutrition, addic-tive substances, movement and physical exercises (Havigerová, Dosedlová & Burešová, 2018).