The U.S. Obesity Epidemic:New Evidence from the Economic Security Index
Trenton Smith (),
Steven Stillman and
Stuart Craig
No 151419, 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association
Abstract:
A growing body of research supports the "economic insecurity" theory of obesity, which posits that uncertainty with respect to one's material well- being may be an important root cause of the modern obesity epidemic. This literature has been limited in the past by a lack of reliable measures of economic insecurity. In this paper we use the newly developed Economic Security Index to explain changes in U.S. adult obesity rates as measured by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) from 1988-2010, a period capturing much of the recent rapid rise in obesity. We find a robust positive and statistically significant relationship between obesity and economic insecurity that holds for nearly every age, gender, and race/ethnicity group in our data, both in cross-section and over time.
Keywords: Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Food Security and Poverty; Research Methods/ Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/151419/files/AAEAesi190613.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
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:ags:aaea13:151419
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.151419
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().