Nine of the top ten causes of death in the united states are non-communicable diseases

The Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded the University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. $577,803 on April 1, 2026, under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI, CFDA 10.310) to conduct research on decision-making ability, preference heterogeneity, and food choices in relation to healthy eating and the social gradient of nutrition.

The project uses revealed preference theory and scanner data to measure consumer decision-making rationality by comparing actual food choices to utility maximization. The research separates unobservable decision-making ability from preference heterogeneity, recovers heterogenous consumer preferences for healthfulness using index number theory, and examines how decision-making ability and preference heterogeneity affect food costs and moderate the effect of package size on diet quality. The work addresses the public health priority of improving diet quality to reduce disparities, given that nine of the top ten causes of death in the United States are non-communicable diseases linked to excess weight and poor diet quality, with lower-income and minority populations disproportionately affected.

Performance occurs in Athens, Georgia. The period of performance runs from April 1, 2026, through March 31, 2030.

Primary risk factors for nearly all of these conditions are excess weight and poor diet quality. Lower income and minority populations are disproportionately affected by these risk factors. Therefore, improving diet quality must be a public health priority both to improve population health and to reduce disparities.obesity and nutrition policies may target food supply or demand. Supply-side policies sometimes are found to have little effect on diet because of strong consumer preferences for less healthy foods. Even when a policy has the intended direct effect, compensatory actions on the part of consumers or suppliers often blunt the overall effectiveness. Policies that may work as intended for an average consumer could have qualitatively different effects on different socioeconomic groups. The goal of this project is to gain an initial but deep understanding of the effects of decision-making ability and preference heterogeneity on food choices as relates to healthy eating and the social gradient of nutrition. Using revealed preference theory and scanner data, we measure decision-making ability by the consistency of consumer food choices to utility maximization. This rationality metric allows US to separate the unobservable decision-making ability from unobservable preference heterogeneity. Leveraging the latest development in index number theory, we recover heterogenous consumer preferences for healthfulness and examine how decision-making ability and preference heterogeneity affect food costs. Finally, we study whether decision-making ability and heterogenous preferences moderate the effect of package size on diet quality.