Essays on Holiday Weight Gain, Meat Consumption and Dietary Structure, and Nutritional Outcome of Food Facility in China

Abstract

As an emerging economy with the largest population, China has undergone rapid economic growth in the last decades. As a result, food patterns and dietary structure in typical Chinese household has changed drastically. A traditional high in fiber, low in fat food has been replaced by high in sugar and fat, high in energy-dense food. As described as nutrition transition, the nutritional outcome of household income growth attracts the attention of researchers. However, how the lifestyle, food patterns and dietary structure, food availability, and nutritional outcome linked with each other in the emerging economy remains unclear. We contribute to the literature by investigating three topics covering those aspects. For the first paper, we study the impact of the golden week policy for the National Day holiday on body weight and obesity since 2000 in the short run and long run. Based on the secondary observational data, we use a regress discontinuity design to deal with the jump in the BMI before and after the National Day holiday. The results show Chinese adults tend to gain 1.561 kg during the National Day holiday. The weight gain shrinks to insignificant 0.491 kg when we turn to the one-month level analysis. For the second paper, we decompose the result of income growth on calorie consumption into conditional income effect and partial effect mediated by change on the dietary structure. Based on household survey data in China, we find that 16 to 21% of the increase is due to dietary structural change, while the rest part is attributed to the conditional income effect. On top of that, we find regional disparity that the dietary structural change effect is more important in rural China. For policymakers, they could estimate the slowdown in increasing demand for meat in urban China but may an uprising demand in rural China. For the third paper, we check the food availability on the nutritional outcome by checking the location of different food facilities on BMI, obesity status of residents, and checking the FAFH frequency and SSB consumption frequency. Unlike the institutional thinking that the Western-style food facility has a larger effect on inducing unhealthy food patterns compared with a Chinese restaurant, we find that the Chinese restaurant has the largest positive impact on BMI and prevalence of obesity. Not surprisingly, the Western fast-food restaurants increase the frequency of SSB consumption. The conventional outdoor food stall could be the good option for residents, since we do not observe any significant unfavored nutritional outcome. For policymakers, it is possible to spread dietary knowledge to reduce the hazard caused by highly processed food. Meanwhile, it is possible to make the regulation on marking the food content and total calories of meals to enhance the nutritional awareness for the residence.