Americans buying fewer manufactured goodies

Santa Claus may not have gotten so many store-bought cookies with his milk this year.

American consumers appear to be buying fewer prepackaged cakes, cookies, pies, doughnuts and pastries, says a new study.

Between 2005 and 2012, overall consumer purchases of “ready-to-eat, grain-based desserts” fell by 24 percent, said University of North Carolina nutritionist Kevin C. Mathias, lead author of the study in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

This is positive news, as researchers are looking for ways to reduce the amount of sugar, saturated fat and “energy” content in American diets, wrote Mr. Mathias and his colleagues.

Unfortunately, they said, over that same seven-year period, they did not see manufacturers changing how they make their delicious but fattening products.

Instead, dessert products introduced in 2012 were not much better, nutritionally speaking, “than the products already existing on the market,” the researchers said.

They called for food manufacturers and public health officials to work together to develop strategies to “shift consumer purchases” toward products with “lower energy, sugar and saturated fat densities,” as well as decreasing the overall purchases of these products.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health agencies are sounding alarms about Americans’ expanding waistlines: Thirty-five percent of adults age 20 and older are obese, as well as 18 percent of children aged 6 and older.

On charts that explain body mass index or BMI, a person who is 5 feet 6 inches tall can weigh up to 154 pounds and be at a healthy weight. Weights between 155 and 185 pounds are considered overweight for this height; 186 pounds or more is considered obese.