Wales records Britain’s second-biggest healthy eating transformation

Nation Cymru staff

Wales has served up one of Britain’s biggest healthy eating transformations, with nearly three quarters of adults now saying their diets are in good shape.

YouGov data analysed by kitchen experts at Prestige found 74% of Welsh adults described their eating habits as either “very healthy” or “fairly healthy” in June 2026.

That put Wales level with the Rest of the South and only narrowly behind London and Scotland in the latest regional table.

However, the scale of Wales’s improvement since before the pandemic gives the nation a stronger claim to healthy eating success.

Across three YouGov surveys conducted in 2019, an average of 65% of adults in Wales described their eating habits as healthy.

That figure has since risen by nine percentage points to 74%, the second-biggest improvement of any region analysed.

Only Scotland, which recorded a 10-percentage point increase, made a larger gain.

Wales also had Britain’s second-highest proportion of people describing their eating habits as “very healthy”.

Some 14% of Welsh respondents selected the most positive answer, behind only London on 16%.

A further 60% described their eating habits as “fairly healthy”, while 24% said they were either “not very healthy” or “not healthy at all”.

The latest result represents a major turnaround for Wales, which shared the lowest healthy eating average with Scotland across the three 2019 surveys but now sits within two percentage points of table-topping London.

Kitchen expert Olivia Disley at Prestige said: “Healthy eating does not have to mean turning every dinner into a complicated science experiment or living on lettuce for the rest of your life.

“The habits that tend to stick are usually the simple ones: keeping fruit and vegetables where you can see them, planning a few meals before shopping and making healthier ingredients as easy to reach as the biscuit tin.

“A well-organised kitchen can make an enormous difference. If your chopping board is buried, your pans are difficult to reach and there is nowhere clear to prepare food, ordering a takeaway will always feel like the easier option. Creating one uncluttered preparation area and keeping everyday ingredients together removes some of that friction.

“Try making one realistic improvement at a time rather than attempting a complete diet overhaul on Monday morning. Add an extra vegetable to dinner, choose a higher-fibre version of something you already eat or prepare tomorrow’s lunch while tonight’s meal is cooking. Healthy eating should work with real life, not require you to become a different person.”

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