Healthy food diversity and supermarket interventions: Evidence from the Seacroft Intervention Study

Abstract

Supermarket interventions have been a commonly used treatment to problems of fresh fruit accessibility in areas of previously limited availability, their wide product ranges and lower-prices making them seemingly perfect for promoting better diets. Empirical studies likewise fall in favour. However, this diversity also serves to give consumers opportunity to entrench their habits and simply purchase more of the bad foods they enjoy. In this paper we develop a new health index based upon UK government guidelines and look to the Seacroft Intervention Study for emprical evidence of supermarket impact thereupon. Using fixed effects unconditional quantile regression to provide robustness to our parameter estimates against covariate specification, we reinforce the message that supermarkets are not a panacea for dietary improvement. Whilst diversity increases it is unlikely to be healthful, entrenching poor dietary habits rather than delivering improvement as intended. Careful consideration of planning policy, health education and sector regulation is needed.

Effects of Food Price Shocks on Dietary Composition of Farm Households’ in Nigeria

“…Hence, households that are engaged primarily in agricultural production consumed more variety of foods than non-agricultural households as this is the case of rural farm households in Nigeria. The results further show that the demand for dietary diversity significantly increases among households headed by farmers in the study, in contrast to what was obtained by Freire and Rudkin (2019), where being a farmer means having decreased food diversity.…”

“…For example, Vadiveloo, Parkeh and Mattei (2015) and Kim, Shin, Guevarra, Lee, Kim, Seol and Isaacson (2017) employed DDS, while Freire and Rudkin (2019) utilized DDI in their respective studies. Similar to the work of Freire and Rudkin (2019), the study constructed the DDI from household food expenditure, which has been aggregated across food groups using Berry index as follows:…”

Availability and placement of healthy and discretionary food in Australian supermarkets by chain and level of socio-economic disadvantage

“…There is some evidence from previous studies investigating 'food deserts' (areas in which there is limited access to healthy food) that suggests that the presence of supermarkets can improve the healthiness of neighbourhood food environments (62) , although these findings are not universally true (63)(64)(65) . Indeed, the heavy promotion of discretionary food within supermarkets means that despite the fact that they typically sell a wide range of healthy food, supermarkets cannot be categorised as entirely healthy places to shop.…”

Modernization of African Food Retailing and (Un)healthy Food Consumption

“…Understanding the links between changing food environments and food consumption patterns is important to promote food security and healthy diets. This is especially true in Africa, where poverty and undernutrition are still widespread, but where being overweight and obesity are also on the rise [16][17][18] Available research suggests that the modernization of food retailing may make calories more affordable for urban consumers but-at the same time-may foster the nutrition transition towards more highly processed foods that are rich in fat, sugar, and salt, but contain low amounts of micronutrients and other ingredients for healthy nutrition [1,12,19,20]. Recent studies with data from different countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America suggest that the growth of supermarkets may contribute to increased consumption of processed foods and a higher body mass index (BMI), after also controlling for household income [13,18,[21][22][23][24].…”