IELTS vocabulary: Food and Diet

Food and diet turn up on the test more often than candidates expect: Task 2 prompts about fast food, sugar taxes, or food industry regulation; Speaking Part 3 questions that follow a Part 2 cue card about a favourite meal, a family recipe, or eating habits in your country; occasionally a General Training letter about a catering problem or a change to a workplace canteen. The trap is that almost everyone reaches for the same three words — "healthy," "junk food," and "balanced diet" — and then repeats them for the rest of the response, because those words are genuinely useful but nowhere near sufficient on their own. An examiner scoring Lexical Resource is listening for whether a candidate can distinguish between related ideas that "healthy" collapses into one vague label: a food can be low in calories but still nutritionally poor, or high in calories but nutrient-dense, and a response that can name that distinction is already operating at a higher band than one that cannot.

Start with how food is produced and classified, since most essays discuss this before moving to health effects. "Processed food" covers anything altered from its raw state during preparation, which includes far more than people assume — canned vegetables count, not just crisps. "Ultra-processed food" is the more specific, increasingly common term for products assembled from industrial ingredients rather than whole foods, typically high in added sugar, salt, or preservatives, and it is the term nutrition researchers actually use rather than the looser "junk food." "Convenience food" describes anything designed for minimal preparation time, which overlaps with but isn't identical to ultra-processed food — a pre-washed bag of salad is convenience food without being ultra-processed. "Staple food" refers to a food that forms the dominant part of a population's diet, such as rice or wheat, and is useful when an essay compares diets across countries. "Nutritional value" is the general term for how much benefit a food provides the body, while "nutrient-dense" is the sharper phrase for a food that delivers a high ratio of vitamins and minerals relative to its calorie content — a distinction worth making explicitly rather than just calling both "healthy."

Policy and industry vocabulary is where Task 2 essays on this topic tend to score highest, because it moves the discussion from personal habit to structural cause. "Food industry regulation" is the umbrella term for government rules governing production, marketing, and sale. "Labelling requirements" refers specifically to what information must legally appear on packaging — calorie counts, allergen warnings, country of origin. "Agricultural subsidies" are government payments that lower the cost of producing certain crops, and essays sometimes argue that subsidising staple grains over fresh produce has unintentionally made unhealthy diets cheaper. "Food security" means reliable, affordable access to sufficient food for a population, and is not the same as "food safety," covered below. "Food desert" is a genuinely useful, less common term for an area — often low-income and urban or remote and rural — where residents have limited access to affordable, nutritious food, typically because supermarkets have closed or never existed there. "Sugar tax" (a levy on sugary drinks or products, intended to reduce consumption) is a specific, defensible example an essay can cite instead of vaguely proposing "the government should do something."