Can Dietary Fiber Intake Be Increased through Nutritional Education and through Subsidies on Selected Food Products?

Abstract

Consumers in the United States fall short of meeting the recommended guideline for dietary fiber intake. Using a quarterly panel of households from Nielsen for the years 2004 through 2014, we employ a Heckman two-step approach to estimate nine panel regressions concerning per person fiber intakes derived from various food categories to uncover the importance of prices as well as socioeconomic and demographic factors. Prices play a prominent role in the per person intake of dietary fiber derived from the respective food products considered. Households below poverty thresholds had lower intakes of fiber relative to households above poverty thresholds. Ethnicity, race, age of the household head, region, and the presence of children also had significant effects on dietary fiber derived from the respective food categories. A proposed 20 percent subsidy applied to fruits and vegetables would increase per person intake of fiber by 9.4 percent. Therefore, if one were to consider meeting the dietary fiber requirement only through the provision of a subsidy, a large subsidy applied to fruits and vegetables would be required. Therefore, given the complex nature of the various factors affecting the intake of dietary fiber, the feasibility of using subsidies alone to increase the intake of dietary fiber is called into question.

Comparing the impact of subsidies and health prompts on choice process variables and food choice: The case of dietary fiber

“…The A recent study focused on dietary fiber consumption that used a large-scale consumer scanner panel dataset estimated that a 20 percent subsidy on fruits and vegetables would lead to a 9.4 percent increase in fiber consumption (Senia et al, 2019). Our results-based on choices in three grain-based food categories-suggest that a 20 percent subsidy on foods that are a great source of dietary fiber (foods that provide 20 percent of the daily recommended amount of dietary fiber per serving) and a 10 percent subsidy on foods that are a good source of dietary fiber (providing 10 percent of the daily recommended amount of dietary fiber per serving) leads to an approximately seven percent increase in fiber content, which is quite close to the effect estimated by (Senia et al, 2019). The prompt, on the other hand, yields a nearly 18 percent increase in per-serving fiber content of the foods selected in the experiment, while the prompt + subsidy condition increases per-serving fiber content by 30 percent.…”

Habitual behavior of household food expenditure by store type in the United States

“…Household income is reported by ranges in the Nielsen Homescan Panel. Similar to previous studies, we take the midpoint of each household income range as the income level of the household [15,61,62]. The mean value of household income for the entire sample is $53,589.…”

Special Issue: Advances in the Economic Analysis of Food System Drivers and Effects

“…For the average American, actual dietary fiber intake of 16 grams per day falls substantially short of the recommend level of 25 grams per day. New research by Senia, Dharmasena, and Capps (2019) shows that this gap is wider for low-income households. In other words, the cost of a fiber-rich diet, determined by the prices of particular products is an important factor in the dietary fiber gap.…”