An earlier survey identified 22 "coping" strategies that parents resorted to when they cou

ldn't sit down with their families to eat a meal that was prepared at home. These including skipping meals altogether, eating at work, eating in the car, ordering take-out on the way home from work, choosing easy and quick-fix meals to serve or overeat after a missed meal.

The 69 low-income wage earners in the first study admitted to skip meals or not eating at home because of time constraints and for financial reasons. In the current study, we found that half of the mothers and fathers surveying depended on 12 of the 22 mealtime coping strategies. We know that when people cat together as family, diets of both the parents and the children tend to be better. But often our jobs don't allow us to eat together at home as often as we'd like.

The issue is not simply a matter of what we eat, but how we eat. Long and regular work hours are a primary cause of unhealthy eating habits, and for scheduling issues can't always be avoided, there are certain workplace-based interventions that could improve the diets of many wage-earning workers. Shift employees, for example, often resort to food from vending machines (自动售货机) because their employers' cafeterias are close during off hours; keeping cafeterias open longer during off-hours could help workers to eat healthier. Having breaks to ensure that employees eat regularly would be other helpful intervention. We hope that by quantifying the nutritional impact of on-the-job constraints. It might finally prompt employers to make some workplace changes. We are not going to fix the obesity epidemic simply by telling people to eat well and choose good food. This study is telling us that it is the structure of our lives what makes it very difficult to do what doctors recommend.

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