Are the Slimmer More Wasteful? The Correlation between Body Mass Index and Food Wastage among Chinese Youth

Long Qian,Lingen Wang,Feng Li,Hongbo Liu

doi:10.3390/su14031411

Abstract

With the economic growth and living standard improvement, food waste has become increasingly common among Chinese youth. To test whether body size affects the food waste performance of youth, we examined university students as representative of the Chinese youth and conducted a large-sample survey in 29 universities across 29 provinces. Based on 9192 questionnaires collected from Chinese college canteens, we found that body size was correlated with food waste. The smaller the body mass index (BMI) value, the higher the likelihood of plate waste, the higher the amount of waste, and the higher the ratio of food waste. Heterogeneity analyses revealed that BMI exerted a more significant impact on males than females, as well as a more substantial impact on northerners than southerners. Robust tests using other proxies to measure body size, robust regressions based on the new adjusted samples, and robust tests with an instrumental variable to overcome the endogenous issue suggested that the slimmer participants tended to be more wasteful. Hence, this study confirms that the slimmer youth tend to leave plate waste and waste more food per capita per meal. This study is the first attempt to analyze food wastage from the perspective of BMI in China to our best knowledge, and it provides a unique viewpoint for understanding young people’s food wastage.

Highlights

Following on from previous studies [7], this study considered university students as representatives of the Chinese youth to investigate the impact of body size or body mass index (BMI) on an individual’s food wastage
74% of young university students have plate waste when dining in university canteens
With the first-hand data collected at 29 colleges in 29 provinces of China, we set university students as the representative of the Chinese youth to determine if body size affects food wastage

Summary

Introduction

Food wastage is a global phenomenon [1], and an estimated one-third of edible food is wasted worldwide [2]. Despite a low index given by the recent Food Waste Index Report. 17% of the total global food production is wasted at the consumer level [3]. Scholars concur that food wastage at the consumer stage is a severe issue in developed countries; the majority of existing food consumption waste studies focus primarily on Western countries and communities. With an increase in income and the enhancement of living standards, food wastage has become more common in the developing world as well [4], the related research in emerging countries is still rare, especially for China

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