The Influence of Prices on a Healthy Diet

Abstract

Several studies have shown that there is a link between diet and the most prevalent welfare diseases. The objective of this paper is to construct a measure which accounts for the healthiness of diets and to look at changes of this measure across households and over time. Focus is especially to identify households with the most unhealthy diet. Another objective is to analyse the influence from prices on the composition of the diet in order to point out household types that respond to prices, and households that do not. The costs of changing diets in a more healthy direction are calculated and thereby it will be possible to identify households for which the budget is a barrier for healthy eating.

Methodology: The estimations are based on a panel dataset with approximately 2500 households' monthly purchases of food, in terms of prices and volume, spanning the period from January 1999 to December 2004. These detailed purchase data are linked with nutrition data, which means, that the households' purchases of macro nutrients and total calories are included in the data. On a yearly basis the households fill in a questionnaire on socio-demographic characteristics including BMI. From the nutrition data a healthy eating index (HEI) is constructed, calculating each household's distance from the official diet recommendations. This gives a measure for the healthiness of each household's diet. An econometric model is formulated which calculate prices for changing diets in a more healthy direction in six main directions. These "prices" are first used to calculate the price of fulfilling the diet recommendations and later used as explanatory variables in a panel data model aiming at explaining healthiness of diets.

Results and Conclusion: There is a clear tendency that healthy eating on average is increasing with social-class and education. Looking at distributions there is, in each of these groups, an equally share being close to obeying the recommendations but a much larger group in lower social classes and among lower educated being far from the recommendations. Preliminary results suggest that it will be costly for most households to change their diet in order to obey the recommendations concerning the intake of fruit, vegetables and fish. On the other hand it is possible to save money cutting back on saturated fat and increasing consumption of fibres. In total it will not be costless to change the diet in a more healthy direction and it will be more costly for lower educated households in the Capital than for other households. There is a lower compliance of lower educated and lower social classes to the diet recommendations. This suggests that information campaigns alone are not enough to reach these households since these types of households are generally more sensitive to price changes than other types of households. Taking into account the costs of changing diets in a more healthy direction suggests that budgets and prices might be a barrier for these households in order to eat healthy.

Keywords: Healty Eating, Prices, Sociodemographic differences

JEL Classification: C23, D12, I12