Americans say they care about getting enough protein and avoiding food dyes. Their eating habits say otherwise.

Americans are fed a lot of information about what counts as healthy food. We wanted to know if these nutritional values are really as important to Americans as the headlines suggest, so, with the help of YouGov, we polled more than 1,500 U.S. adults in April 2025.

The results: Most people agree that protein is important, and food dyes should be banned. And yet, a much smaller share of Americans are checking food labels for these ingredients. So what gives? We spoke to experts about whether Americans really value the nutritional concerns that make headlines, and what you can do to better align your ideals with your dietary habits.

What our survey found: A difference between what we think and what we eat

We asked Americans about whether they consider nutritional information when they choose what to eat and, if so, what factors they prioritize (meaning: calories, sodium, etc.). Then we zoomed in on two nutritional topics that have gotten a lot of buzz lately: protein and red dyes.

Protein has been having a moment, partly because it’s what some experts have dubbed “the last macronutrient standing” amid the bad raps of fats and carbs. Its connection to muscle building and weight loss — especially in conjunction with GLP-1 medications like Ozempic — has been a further boon to protein. Americans seem to have taken note. A large majority (85%) of respondents to the Yahoo News/YouGov poll said that protein is very or somewhat important to them when choosing what to eat. Yet among the two-thirds of respondents who said they check nutritional labels, only 13% said that protein is the factor they pay most attention to when choosing what to eat. And only about a quarter of respondents said they’re eating more protein now than they were a year ago.

We found the same pattern when it comes to food dyes. More than two-thirds (65%) of respondents to our poll said they approve of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s move to ban many artificial colorings. But only 37% of respondents said they actively avoid food dyes, and just 27% said they always or usually check food labels for the ingredients (another 24% said they sometimes check).

There’s a name for that: The intention-action gap

If we’re so aware of what we should be including or avoiding in our food, but don’t necessarily act on it, are we just too lazy to make healthy choices? Not exactly. For example, 66% of the respondents to our survey make the effort to check nutritional information. But the most commonly considered factor was calorie content (16%), which isn’t necessarily a good indicator of whether a food is healthy, according to recent research. While it might seem fairly easy to check foods for their content of other nutrients, calculating out how much we need of each of these (protein, vitamins, etc.) gets complicated, fast. “There’s a lot of evidence that people don’t take actions that are in their best interests based on their knowledge,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of Tufts University’s Food Is Medicine Institute. “People have an aspirational image of what they would like to do, and then [there’s] what they do in real life.”

This phenomenon is known as the intention-action gap. “And for nutrition, it’s doubly or triply complicated by the beliefs and intentions and knowledge also being a huge source of confusion for people,” says Mozaffarian.

Picture yourself at the grocery store or in the drive-through line. What’s on your checklist? Protein? Food dyes? Calories? Whole grains? And how much is enough, or too much, and what even qualifies as a whole grain anyway? Does a Whopper meal count as paleo? “That confusion dramatically increases the gap between aspirations and actions,” says Mozaffarian.

It also takes time — a lot of it. “Our lives are all busy, and just because we would like to do something doesn’t mean we will actually get around to doing it,” Teresa Fung, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Simmons University and Harvard University, tells Yahoo Life. And with new diet trends and hyped ingredients and priorities cropping up all the time, it can be hard to stay focused on the things that really matter for your personal diet. Fung is glad that people are aware of issues like food additives, “but hopefully it’s not at the expense of other things,” she says. “If it’s just for a few months that I’m paying attention to [any one food issue] and then a year from now I’m not,” that’s not helpful, she adds.

However, some public health experts, including Mozzaffarian, believe that certain foods “just shouldn’t be on the shelf,” he says. Specifically, he notes that poor quality diets and ultra-processed foods are linked to health conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome (a collection of related health problems common among overweight and obese people). “It’s not an information problem, it’s a product problem,” Mozzaffarian says.

Experts’ strategies to help you eat your values

Until food is better regulated, nutrition labels are still key to making healthy choices, says Mozaffarian. Grocery shopping and cooking at home go a long way to help you take control of your health, instead of eating packaged, restaurant or fast foods.

And, perhaps counterintuitively, “if you want to eat healthier, buy more products without labels,” Mozaffarian says, meaning whole foods like fruits, vegetables and eggs.

When it comes to protein, most people actually don’t need to stress too much about whether they’re eating enough of it. “The typical American diet already has enough protein, so if people are already doing it, they don’t really need to take the additional action” of checking labels for protein content, she says. Fung also suspects that, like most single-nutrient eating trends, the protein obsession will fade. “It happens all the time: There are always new discoveries, and people focus on them until they’re no longer new, then we wait for the next shiny new thing,” she says. That’s another strategy: If the food rules you’re trying to follow are super trendy, they probably aren’t that sustainable, or essential, Fung adds. However, in some cases, there’s a grain of truth to nutritional trends, and some exceptions are worth making. For example, perimenopausal and menopausal women really do need to up their protein intake. And the majority of Americans don’t eat enough fiber, so the ongoing fibermaxxing trend actually is dietitian-approved.

Fung and Mozaffarian acknowledge that, even if you aren’t trying to keep up with the latest food fad, it takes a lot of time and energy to eat the way you aspire. “It’s like another job you have to do after you come home from your job,” says Fung. She says that if you can afford it, buying precut vegetables that are bagged and washed can save time and make it just a little easier to cook at home. She also advises making one or two simple changes at a time if you’re trying to improve your diet.

“Pick two things you want to change, and they have to be things that are changeable within your resources and that you can change for the long haul,” says Fung. “Healthy dietary habits are never extreme.” She adds: “Health is a long-term project.”