Health, Nutrition and Food Demand: Effects of Information and the Substitution between Good Foods and Bad Foods

Diet related ill-health and early death are linked to obesity, cardiovascular disease, some cancers (e.g. breast, colon), strokes, diabetes and hypertension. Increasing concern about the relation between overweight and obesity and good foods/bad foods ind icates that health is a key aspect of the future of food and farming. The proposed project deals with the consumption of unhealthy and healthy food products and how health information, advertising and prices affect the consumption of such products, and how it is possible to use public policies to affect the demand for healthy and unhealthy food products. The risks of dietary inadequacies and adverse health effects are most serious among households consuming either large quantities of unhealthy products , low quantities of healthy products, or both, i.e. the distribution of consumption is at least as important as the mean consumption. Consequently, we will focus on the consumption in high- and low-consuming households of healthy and unhealthy foods, res pectively. We will use economic consumer theory, both classical theory, household production theory and theory for rational addiction together with household data and econometric and statistical methods. Our intention is to construct and estimate models that can tell us what determine the demand for healthy and unhealthy food amongst those who eat little healthy food and those that eat much unhealthy food. We will focus on demand for good foods: fruits, vegetables, coarse cereals, fish, low-fat milk an d lean meat and bad foods: "junk food", snacks, candy and sugary soft drinks. We are specially intersted in the effects of health information, advertising, and prices on demand for these products in the whole conditional distribution.