Nutrition

Longitudinal associations between psychological well-being and the consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Eligibility for a free lunch was recently extended to all state school children in England and Scotland who are in Year 2 or below (i.e. up to age 6 or 7). For all other state school pupils in the UK, eligibility remains restricted by a means test so that free school meals (FSMs) go to a relatively narrow set of children in poor households. Around 1 million children currently receive means-tested FSMs: equivalent to 15% of those who are not entitled to universal FSMs. We estimate that around two-thirds of those children are in the lowest-income fifth of households with children.

Getting a healthy start: the effectiveness of targeted benefits for improving dietary choices

Corrective taxes have been implemented in a number of countries with the aim of addressing growing concern about the rise in obesity- and diet-related diseases. The rationale is that food consumption imposes costs on the consumer in the future that they do not fully take into account at the point of consumption (‘internalities’). Corrective taxes have the potential to improve welfare by reducing suboptimally high consumption. We review the literature on the size of these internalities and on the optimal corrective tax, which depends on the patterns of internalities, the price responsiveness of consumers, and on redistributive aims.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The concept of dynapenic obesity has been gaining great attention recently. However, there is little epidemiological evidence demonstrating that dynapenic abdominal obese individuals have worse trajectories of disability than those with dynapenia and abdominal obesity alone. Our aim was to investigate whether dynapenia combined with abdominal obesity can result in worse trajectories of instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) among English and Brazilian older adults over eight and ten years of follow-up, respectively.

We study whether and how individuals protect energy intakes against income shocks and we find that households use substitution, both between and within spending categories. Total nutritional intakes are almost fully protected against income shocks and 12-16% of permanent income shocks on food spending is transmitted to energy intake.

Using recall and diary food expenditure data from Canada, we compare estimates of the household size elasticity of per capita food expenditure.

An informational intervention in Western Kenya

The exposure of households’ food spending to tariff changes and exchange rate movements

Background: A possible role of vitamin D in depression has received considerable attention, especially given the significant disability, mortality, and healthcare costs associated to depression and the high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency.

Background: Evidence on the role of lifestyle factors in relation to multimorbidity, especially in elderly populations, is scarce. We assessed the association between five lifestyle factors and incident multimorbidity (presence of ≥2 chronic conditions) in an English cohort aged ≥50 years.

Body mass index as a predictor of healthy and disease-free life expectancy between ages 50 and 75: a multicohort study

There have been calls for restrictions on junk food advertising to tackle rising rates of obesity around the world. This column examines the likely effect of a ban on potato crisp advertising. Results suggest that the total quantity of crisps sold would fall by around 15% in the presence of a ban, or by 10% if firms respond with price cuts. The welfare benefits from this would depend on whether current advertising is persuasive, informative or complementary.

There are growing calls to restrict advertising of junk foods. Whether such a move will improve diet quality will depend on how advertising shifts consumer demands and how firms respond. We study an important and typical junk food market – the potato chips market.