What happens to your diet when you get better at cooking?

by · News-Medical

From meal planning to hands-on cooking, researchers examined whether building confidence in the kitchen can meaningfully change how healthy adults eat.

Study: Can the development of cooking skills influence nutritional status and diet? A systematic review. Image Credit: Mila Lazo / Shutterstock

Want to read later? Download your PDF copy by clicking here.

Background

Cooking skills were defined broadly as the knowledge, confidence, and attitudes needed for food preparation. These included not only cooking techniques but also meal planning, food selection, purchasing food within a budget, and practices that can reduce food waste and overall food preparation time.

Cooking skills are strongly influenced by early exposure to food preparation within the family, especially in childhood and adolescence.

Better cooking skills have been linked to increased consumption of less-processed foods, especially fruit and vegetables, and to higher intakes of fiber, micronutrients, and unsaturated fats.

Prior studies have suggested that cooking skills might also help improve nutritional status and quality of life among individuals with chronic diseases, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity, while targeted interventions have reported positive effects on dietary behaviors and health outcomes among children, adolescents, and pregnant women, thus potentially influencing long-term health. The current study sought to provide a comprehensive overview of the relationship between cooking skills and dietary health and nutritional status.

Review characteristics

The review included 15 studies: 6 were non-randomized intervention studies, and 5 were quasi-experimental studies. Four were randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Nine were conducted in the US, three in Australia, two in Europe, and one in Kenya.

The interventions varied considerably. One consisted of a single 15-minute intervention with short-term follow-up, while at the other end of the spectrum, there were sessions lasting up to 480 minutes in a four-week study and a one-year-long intervention.

Most lasted 5- 14 weeks, with weekly sessions lasting 60–150 minutes, especially in community-based or university studies. University-based interventions often involved higher weekly time commitments and combined instruction in cooking theory followed by practical cooking.

Only one examined nutritional status via the body mass index (BMI).

In view of the heterogeneity, the authors chose to perform a narrative rather than a quantitative meta-analysis.

Effects on diet

The review found that cooking-skills interventions were generally associated with healthier dietary behaviors, including greater consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Sugar-sweetened beverage intake decreased, and fewer meals were skipped.

Two studies reported improvements in overall dietary quality as measured by healthy-eating indices. These changes were accompanied by more frequent home-cooked meals.

Moreover, better cooking skills were associated with greater cooking self-efficacy and the use of dietary self-management strategies, as participants became more confident about their ability to cook healthy meals. They also tended to consume more minimally processed foods.

These findings occurred across different settings, including food-insecure populations, university students, and small-scale producers. However, the high risk of bias meant the certainty of evidence was very low for non-randomized and quasi-experimental studies and low for RCTs.

Effect on nutritional status

The authors found no reliable evidence that cooking-skills interventions affected nutritional status. However, only one study examined this outcome using BMI, and it had methodological flaws.

They noted that multiple factors affect nutritional status, including physical activity, access to food, social and economic factors, and sleep. They suggest that well-conducted RCTs with larger, more diverse study samples, conducted over longer periods, may be necessary to detect changes in this outcome, as measured by body mass index (BMI).

Moreover, the included studies involved healthy adults, in whom substantial changes in BMI are less likely, making it more difficult to detect BMI changes. They also suggest that group interventions alone may be insufficient to produce measurable changes in BMI and that adding individualized strategies could enhance effectiveness.

Limitations

Most non-randomized studies had a serious risk of bias due to factors including lack of blinding, loss to follow-up, and convenience sampling. Two of the RCTs were also classified as being at a high risk of bias due to missing outcome data.

The review was also limited by substantial heterogeneity between studies, reliance on self-reported dietary measures, and the possible exclusion of relevant grey literature.

However, blinding is often not feasible in dietary intervention studies.

Conclusions

The authors concluded that developing cooking skills might improve selected dietary behaviors, particularly fruit and vegetable intake and cooking confidence. However, the low or very low certainty of the evidence limits the robustness and reliability of these findings.

“This review suggests that cooking skills interventions may contribute to promoting healthier dietary behaviors, while also underscoring the urgency of high-quality clinical trials to provide a stronger evidence base regarding their effects on diet and nutritional status.”

Journal reference: