Can adherence to dietary guidelines address excess caloric intake? An empirical assessment for the UK

C.S Srinivasan

doi:10.1016/j.ehb.2013.04.003

Abstract

The facilitation of healthier dietary choices by consumers is a key element of government strategies to combat the rising incidence of obesity in developed and developing countries. Public health campaigns to promote healthier eating often target compliance with recommended dietary guidelines for consumption of individual nutrients such as fats and added sugars. This paper examines the association between improved compliance with dietary guidelines for individual nutrients and excess calorie intake, the most proximate determinant of obesity risk. We apply quantile regressions and counterfactual decompositions to cross-sectional data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (2000–01) to assess how excess calorie consumption patterns in the UK are likely to change with improved compliance with dietary guidelines. We find that the effects of compliance vary significantly across different quantiles of calorie consumption. Our results show that compliance with dietary guidelines for individual nutrients, even if successfully achieved, is likely to be associated with only modest shifts in excess calorie consumption patterns. Consequently, public health campaigns that target compliance with dietary guidelines for specific nutrients in isolation are unlikely to have a significant effect on the obesity risk faced by the population.

Highlights

Faced with the rising incidence of obesity in their populations, governments in both developed and developing countries are seeking to promote healthier food choices by consumers through a range of economic, regulatory and information measures
ECCτ= α1τ + β1τ satfat + β2τ pufat + β3τ monofat + β4τ sugar + β5τ prot + β6τ star + β7τ frveg + β8τ fibre + β9τ sodium +β10 τsmoking + β11τ alcoh +β12τ chol + β13τ phyact + β14τ age + β15τ female + β16τ race-ethnic + β17τ manual + ετ where the dependent variable excess calorie consumption” (ECC) denotes excess calorie consumption, the explanatory variables are as described in Table-4, τ denotes quantiles and ε is the error term
While the mean response to an increase in the share of saturated fat in energy intake is an increase in excess calorie consumption, our results show that in the top quantiles of ECC a reduction in the share of energy from saturated fat may not be associated with significant changes in ECC

Summary

Introduction

Faced with the rising incidence of obesity in their populations, governments in both developed and developing countries are seeking to promote healthier food choices by consumers through a range of economic, regulatory and information measures. Promoting adherence to recommended dietary guidelines for key nutrients is an important element of the strategy for promoting healthier eating. It provides the rationale for a variety of public health campaigns such as the UK Government’s “five a day” campaign to increase fruit and vegetable consumption and the “Change4life –Eat Well, Move More, Live Longer” campaign, the European Commission’s “Salt Campaign” to reduce salt intake and the US Based on our empirical analysis for the UK, we argue that adherence to dietary guidelines for individual nutrients, even if successfully accomplished through public health campaigns and other measures, is likely to be associated with only

Methods

Results

Conclusion