Table 2.

Comments Related to Healthful Eating, by Topic and Theme, Among Employees of Small Worksites in Rural Georgia, 2005

Theme/Topic	Participant Comment
Conversations About Healthful Eating at Work
Commonly discussed	. . . I think in any working environment where it's a small group, there's that interaction about food constantly. I mean that's a pretty good topic for people to talk about. (white male participant)
Types of food	Occasionally we talk [about] why we don't eat this particular thing because it has "x" number of calories or we don't need this . . . and we talk about eating fruit, because you need fruit [more] than that other stuff. (African American female participant)
Food preparation	Yes . . . [we] talk about how they're preparing food and what kind of foods they're preparing. . . . I'll bring a sample of something that we had for dinner back to work . . . then talk to them about how they're cooking their foods. They're pretty much meat and potatoes–oriented, you know. Try to expand that a little bit. (white male participant)
	Well, we'll just talk about the need to have less fat or how greasy the food is in the lunch room and how we wish they'd drain the stuff better, at least, that sort of thing . . . and the fact that they tend to empty the salt shaker into the food. (white female participant)
Programs for healthful eating at work	It has none. In the past . . . they paid some lip service to that. At one point, they got some kind of grant — they being the administration I guess — they got some type of grant, and they actually bought some exercise equipment, which was supposed to go in the teachers' [lounge]. I don't know when they thought they were going to use it . . . but that kind of petered out, and I don't even know what happened to the equipment. . . . We had a couple of speakers one time several years ago talking to the teachers about that sort of thing, lifestyle, healthy lifestyles. (white female participant)
Conversations About Losing Weight at Work
Physical activity	I've hired a couple of new men, and both of them are slightly overweight and I've talked to them about . . . losing weight and walking to work. . . . [One employee] has started walking to work. He lives approximately a half mile from the station. (white male participant)
Eating choices	[A coworker] lost a lot of weight and then he got married, and now he's gaining a little weight . . . so he talks [about how] he'll eat his Healthy Choice at lunch sometimes, and I don't know what he eats when he goes home. But yeah, it's a big conversation down here about losing weight. (white female participant)
Barriers to Healthful Eating at Work
Lack of time	You're on the go. You really don't have time, so you're going to grab something that's quick and easy, and it's never healthy. Like, you know, run through McDonald's on the way to taking a load of concrete out, you know, just to not be hungry. You can get in there and be out in a minute or 2. (white female participant)
Presence of unhealthful food	The presence of the food on Friday makes it hard because it's tempting . . . cinnamon buns and so forth. That's a real treat. (white male participant)
Lack of access to healthful food	Well, first of all, they don't have no healthy food on the job. . . . No, they don't have anything but them vending machines, you know, and there isn't anything in them but snacks. (African American male participant)
	Like I said, where you work, the place you working at . . . [is] way out in the country somewhere or somewhere not close to a store or a restaurant, so you have to say, "Go with what you got." Or . . . somebody might go and get a lunch for everybody, but you still have to buy that. (African American male participant)