IF YOUR MEALS today have been more beige than bright and colourful, you’re by no means the only one. According to Healthy Ireland, over a third of us (35%) tend to eat unhealthy foods at least once a day and almost a fifth of us (18%) eat no fruit or veg on a day-to-day basis.

When we asked you about your eating habits recently for The Health Check with Irish Life Health, you gave yours about a 5.8/10 for satisfaction. While eating a balanced diet was important to you (7.8/10), stress was a major factor (7.1/10) and you felt that eating the recommended 10-a-day was only a 5.2/10 in achievability.

When we put the results to two nutritionists, they had some simple suggestions including avoiding breakfasts that are high in sugar, adding fruit and vegetables to your plate first to ensure they take up at least half of your meal and rethinking your relationship to food in times of stress. 

So, now that we’ve totted up the numbers on our eating habits and heard from the experts about the most powerful changes we can make for ourselves, we want to take a look at the real life experiences of how individual people eat.

To gain some insight, we took to the streets one morning to ask busy people in Dublin – what are their eating habits really like?

Their answers were extremely mixed – from those who often ate fast food late at night to those who prepared overnight oats each day. One man admitted: “I had a busy week maybe two or three weeks ago and I think I didn’t eat for two days.”

Read more from The Health Check:

From sleepless nights to screen time: Share your experience of being a parent here

Are you chilled out or burned out? Rate your stress levels here

Five-a-day or five takeaways a week? Rate your diet here

Over the past few months as part of The Health Check, we’ve been capturing a snapshot of our health as a nation with Irish Life Health. We’ll be compiling anonymous, real-time ratings and talking to experts about the results and what they mean for our health. We know Irish Life. We are Irish Life Health.