Household food consumption, individual caloric intake and obesity in France

Céline Bonnet, Pierre Dubois and Valérie Orozco ()

Empirical Economics, 2014, vol. 46, issue 3, 1143-1166

Abstract: Using 2 years of home scanned data on household food purchases in France, we show how to infer the profile of average individual caloric intakes according to gender, age, and body mass index of household members. We also infer the individual consumption of macronutrients as carbohydrates, lipids or proteins. We then provide a descriptive analysis of eating in France over a long period of consumption that we compare to nutritional recommendations given by the French National Health and Nutrition Program. The results suggest that French people eat too much fats and proteins and not enough carbohydrates with respect to recommendations. They also show that obese or overweight individuals consume more calories at all ages and their consumption of fat is 20 % higher than normal individuals, meaning that public policies should aim at reducing fat consumption. We also find that the obesity of teenage boys cannot be explained by different food consumption as their dietary intake profiles are similar to other teenagers. Promoting physical activity for boys rather than public policies reducing food consumption could be more efficient. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Body Mass Index; Obesity; Nutrients; Energy; Individual food consumption; I18; D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-013-0698-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Household Food Consumption, Individual Caloric Intake and Obesity in France (2011)
Working Paper: Household Food Consumption, Individual Caloric Intake and Obesity in France (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:empeco:v:46:y:2014:i:3:p:1143-1166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-013-0698-1

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().