Study: less healthy grocery choices may be more about choice than access; four unhealthiest counties are rural - Entrepreneur Generations

Common wisdom for years has held that people buy less healthful foods because they can't afford healthier foods or because they can't find them in local groceries, but new research has found that some people may simply be less interested in buying health foods than others. "According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, those groups include consumers who make less money, have less education, possess lower levels of nutrition knowledge and live in certain geographic areas," Caitlin Dewey reports for The Washington Post.

The four unhealthiest counties were Menominee County, Wis.; Turner County, Ga.; McNairy County, Tenn.; and Musselshell, Mont. All four are rural counties. The healthiest three counties were New York County, N.Y.; Pitkin County, Colo.; and Iroquois County, Ill. Though New York is an urban county, Pitkin and Iroquois are rural. Pitkin has one of the highest median incomes and highest life expectancies in the country.

Washington Post map; click to enlarge it.

It's already known that high-income families tend to buy healthier foods than the poor, but that can't be explained entirely by cost or availability of healthy food. The paper, which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, analyzed 12 years of Nielsen grocery purchase data from 100,000 households across the U.S. to find out why. The researchers studied what happened to a household's food purchases when a new grocery store opened nearby, or when the household moved from a food desert to an area with more grocery options. They found that such changes had a limited impact on the foods those households bought.

So it may have been more about demand than access, though the researchers stress that there were factors the study didn't consider, including the time to plan and cook meals, exposure to food marketing, and stress levels.

Lead researcher Hunt Allcott, an economist at New York University, "hypothesizes that a region’s dominant cuisine, be that barbecue or avocado toast, informs the meals that people eat as children. That, in turn, has a large effect on their lifelong food preferences," Dewey reports.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2EabTAA Study: less healthy grocery choices may be more about choice than access; four unhealthiest counties are rural - Entrepreneur Generations

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