Eating out and eating right: Understanding the relationship between food consumption decision and education using comprehensive consumer level data

ABSTRACT

The relation between education and health has been well established in the literature, especially as it pertains to chronic diseases like obesity. But, due to data limitations, most extant research lacks a direct explanation of unhealthy eating behaviour. The current study examines this relationship among a diverse set of compositional place indicators with direct measurement of healthy and unhealthy eating behaviour across census block groups in the United States. We empirically examine the relationships between education, obesity, and the number of patrons at healthy and unhealthy eating establishments in the United States. Results obtained through various alternative empirical models show the effect of education on unhealthy eating habits. People who reside in areas with low education show higher frequencies of unhealthy eating behaviours. We also found that the number of reviews is essential to both healthy and unhealthy restaurants. Furthermore, we observed a significant change in food choices on weekdays vs. weekends. On weekends, consumers are less sensitive about the price for both healthy and unhealthy restaurants. These results contribute to previous studies on the reduced health status in low-educated geographical locations. The results point to important policy implications for mitigating obesity and improving healthy eating by geographical variation

KEYWORDS:

• Obesity
• education
• health
• food
• restaurant

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D90
• I12
• I20

Acknowledgements

The authors thank SafeGraph for making the data available.

We thank Dr. Jong Hyun Chung, Dr. Aditi Sengupta and Dr. Hyeongwoo Kim for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors are ours.

Statements and declarations

• The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

• The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

• All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

• The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.

• No ethical considerations are needed. No human subjects were used and only anonymous data was used in this analysis.

• Dr. Tannista Banerjee contributed to data identification, data collection, data analysis and manuscript preparation. Dr. HaiYue Zhao contributed to hand data collection, data analysis and manuscript preparation. All authors contributed equally.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Also known as Federal Information Processing Series, are numeric codes assigned by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). FIPS codes are numbers which uniquely identify geographic areas.