Conventional wisdom says the richer you are the better access you have to good things in life. Wealthier people can buy houses in nicer and safer areas, go on vacations more often, wear nicer clothes, invest more in personal care, and overall indulge in healthier decisions that ensure a long and happy life. Yet when it comes to nutrition habits, people’s choices seem somewhat counter-intuitive.
New research by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Kilts Center for Marketing shows that access to healthier food choices in the U.S. doesn’t always translate into healthier decisions. According to the study, when low-income households are exposed to the same products and prices as those that high-income households have access to, nutritional inequality drops by only 9 percentage points. The remaining gap of 91 percentage points is driven by preference, say experts.
“High-income households (making more than $70,000 a year) are willing to pay almost double for the daily recommended quantity of vegetables and nearly three times more for daily recommended quantity of fruit, the researchers estimate,” the study shows. “By contrast, low-income households (making less than $25,000 a year) are willing to pay more for sugar and saturated fats.”
The study also showed that low-income people living in a “food desert” — an area that has no supermarkets with healthy food options — do travel outside their areas to buy groceries, and they do so for on average 7 miles. Even those who don’t own a car travel 2 miles.
The study aimed at testing a hypothesis launched in the 1990s in the United Kingdom that stated people consumed unhealthy foods simply because there were no nearby supermarkets carrying more fruits and vegetables.
“The maintained opinion was that it must be that people eat less healthy because there is no healthy food available,” says Jean-Pierre Dubé, professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and author of the 2018 study. “But that lack of availability could also reflect something else, and that is that there is no demand for the healthy food.”
The study at the University of Chicago used data from grocery purchases in 60,000 households per year and grocery sales at about 35,000 stores nationwide from 2004 to 2015. The authors also looked at the location of 1,914 supermarkets in order to better assess the impact of new supermarkets in food deserts, and developed a health index measuring the level of nutritious purchases in American households.
Similar studies around the world that looked at the impact of food preferences on caloric intake have shown that people’s preferences are strong regardless of food options in their geographic area. In India, for example, research from 2013 that examined food choices revealed that even when people move from one area to another, they would still go for the grain they were used to eating, even if the price for that particular grain in the new region had increased.
The results from the study at the University of Chicago also showed that between 2012 and 2015 the index increased five times more for high-earning households compared to low-level income households than it did between 2004 and 2017. The reasons for an increased nutrition gap between the wealthy and the low-income are yet to be established, yet researchers point out toward a correlation between education levels and food preferences.
“How many years of schooling you completed, your responses to a very standards nutritional quiz that we administered, these factors were all pretty coordinated with differences in nutritional preferences,” says Dubé. “That definitely suggests that things like education and knowledge could be partially at the roots of nutritional inequality.”
More from U.S. News
Economic Inequality and Happiness
When It Comes to Food, Why Aren’t We ‘Pro-Choice?’
Choices Affect Nutritional Inequality in U.S. More than Money, Research Suggests originally appeared on usnews.com
