Food habits of different worker categories: an integrative review

Food is a physiological necessity for humans and is built on and permeated by many different biological, economic, social, and cultural symbols and phenomena. The basic conditions for adequate nutrition should be associated with cultural and financial values, physical accessibility, flavor, variety, color, and harmony and based on consumption of foods, not exclusively on nutrients. However, changes to the population’s profile of consumption and dietary habits are founded on the process of urbanization and industrialization, which plays a fundamental role in this phenomenon, causing lifestyle changes that are linked with stimulus of consumption of industrialized products, with publicity, and with mass marketing. The objective of the study was to investigate the profile of the dietary habits of workers from different occupational categories in Brazil, with a sample of 13 articles. Moreover, research shows that many different categories of workers are subject to nutritional losses because of this new lifestyle. Searches were run on the Google Scholar, LILACS, and SciELO databases for publications during the last 5 years, identifying more than 15 thousand articles, 13 of which were selected as fitting the criteria chosen. Data were collected in April and May of 2020. The inclusion criteria were articles published in Portuguese with the full text available. Exclusion criteria were duplicates and studies with seniors and/or children. It was concluded that the dietary habits of the workers studied are unhealthy and that their consumption profile is widely incompatible with the guiding principles of the Food Guide for the Brazilian population. These people are therefore at increased risk of non-transmissible chronic diseases and morbidity and mortality. There is a need to take more effective interventional action, totally restructuring the educational process to form dietary habits, such as implementing public policies targeting this section of the population, which is so important for national development.