Consumer Demand for Healthy Diet: New Evidence from the Healthy Eating Index

Zhifeng Gao, Xiaohua Yu and Jonq-Ying Lee
Additional contact information
Jonq-Ying Lee: University of Florida

No 69, Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers from Courant Research Centre PEG

Abstract: A large volume of literature has been focusing on the measure of diet quality and consumer demand for food. However, little has estimated consumer demand for diet quality. In this article, we systematically estimate consumer demand for diet quality using the healthy eating index (HEI) developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Results show that consumers have insufficient consumption of the food containing dark green, orange vegetable, legumes and total grain. Age and education have significant impact on consumer demand for diet quality but income does not. The own price elasticities of demand for diet quality are inelastic and are larger than cross price elasticities. Asymmetric cross price elasticity exists between the diet quality of solid fats, alcoholic beverages and added sugars and the quality of other diet groups. This information is critical in policies and programs that are designed to improve consumer healthy food choice which can reduce social cost of public health.

Keywords: Healthy Eating Index; Diet quality; Demand; Household production; Translog cost function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cis, nep-hea and nep-mkt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.vwl.wiso.uni-goettingen.de/courant-papers/CRC-PEG_DP_69.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumer Demand for Healthy Diet: New Evidence from Healthy Eating Index (2010)
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:got:gotcrc:069

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers from Courant Research Centre PEG Platz der Goettinger Sieben 3; D-37073 Goettingen, GERMANY.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dominik Noe ().