You get a diagnosis of diabetes or heart disease. Your doctor tells you to change what you eat.
Do you? And if you don't, is it because you don't want to change your diet? Or because healthier choices can cost more?
University of Florida researchers are setting out to study what happens in the grocery cart after someone is diagnosed with a chronic disease. They want to know whether people change the nutritional quality of the foods they buy, how long those changes last and what role food prices play.
The project is funded through a $525,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
The researchers will use data from more than 120,000 U.S. households to examine grocery purchases and other consumer behavior, along with health and prescription medication information.
Researchers hope to separate some of the reasons people do or don't change their eating habits after a diagnosis. Maybe someone wants to make healthier choices but finds the cost difficult. Or maybe knowing what they should eat doesn't necessarily translate into changing what they routinely buy.
“A chronic disease diagnosis often comes with advice about what people should eat, but knowing what to eat and being able to afford and sustain those changes are two different things,” said the project’s principal investor, Di Fang, an associate professor in UF's Food and Resource Economics Department.
The researchers also will examine how food prices and economic circumstances affect those decisions.
“Research shows that for most consumers, price is of key importance when choosing what to buy, and this is more so for families with lower incomes as well as larger families where their income has to stretch further,” said Frank Asche, a natural resource economics professor with UF’s School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences.
“However, a healthy diet need not be expensive as nutritional attributes often do not impact the product price. As such, dietary advice can be more effective if accounting also for cost.”
According to UF, researchers hope the findings can help policymakers and nutrition programs better understand what makes dietary changes possible – and what gets in the way.
