People who often eat out spend more money on meals, waste more food and eat less healthily than people who frequently make their own lunch, according to a result of a survey released by the Taipei Medical University Hospital yesterday.
In order to understand the eating and consumption habits of the nation’s office workers, the hospital conducted a survey earlier this month of 1,400 people, with 90 percent of the respondents being office workers, 56 percent of which were between 25 and 35 years old.
Chief of the hospital’s department of nutrition, Su Hsiu-yueh (蘇秀悅), said 78 percent of the respondents said they frequently eat out. Using this percentage, the hospital estimated that there are more than 6.46 million office workers in Taiwan who often eat out.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
The survey results showed that people who mostly eat out spend an average of NT$5,517 (US$183) on meals per week, which is 24 percent more than those who take their own lunch to work spend — NT$4,416.
Comparing the monthly expenses of the two groups, people who often eat out spend an average of NT$13,371 per month, while people who make their lunch spend an average of NT$11,507 per month, Su said, adding that people who bring food from home can save about NT$2,000 more than those who eat out each month, which is approximately one month’s worth of a graduate’s wages a year.
The survey data also showed that 27.7 percent of people who make their lunch say they often cannot finish eating their meal, compared with up to 54.7 percent of those who frequently eat out, 86 percent of which tend to end up throwing the remaining food away.
However, the respondents who often eat out and do finish their meals have a tendency to eat much more than they should and consequently have a higher body mass index (BMI) ratio than those who often throw away the unfinished meals, the hospital said.
In addition, the survey results reflected the prevalence of those with imbalanced diets — less than 10 percent of the respondents said that they eat food from all six food groups on a daily basis, while 60 percent of people who frequently eat out said that they seldom eat food from all six food groups in one day.
Su said the survey results also showed that although 93 percent of people that frequent restaurants recognize that using disposable containers and utensils is harmful to the environment, 94 percent of them still often use the utensils and containers due to their convenience, showing an inconformity between their knowledge and behavior.
To make eating out healthier, people can split the food from a lunch box into two meals, keeping one-third of the meat and rice in tupperware containers for another meal, Su suggested, adding that this method could also cut meal costs and help maintain a healthier diet.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching