18 February 2010 @ 1600

NCG Seminar

Hume Building Conference Room, Third Floor, John Hume Building, NUI Maynooth.

"The Impact of Food Availability on Dietary Quality: Evidence for Ireland"

Prof. Richard Layte is joint programme coordinator of Health Research at the ESRI and a health theme director of the Growing Up in Ireland Study.
An economic sociologist, he has worked at the ESRI since 1998. His research centres on the way in which education, work and institutional factors such as health and social welfare systems influence a person’s risk of poverty, disadvantage and poor health and the manner in which these elements interact across the life course. His recent work has focused on patterns of health and healthcare. A major theme of his work is the relationship between patterns of health care utilisation and factors such as income, health insurance and medical card status. He has recently finished a project for the HRB on the impact of demographic change on the demand for and delivery of healthcare in Ireland to 2021.
His work also examines the influence of socio-economic status on health behaviours such as smoking, diet and sexual behaviour.

This seminar investigates the impact of food availability on the quality of diet within a large sample of individuals from the Republic of Ireland. There is now good evidence across a number of countries that socio-economic status is inversely related to the quality of an individual’s diet and nutrition. There is far less consistency in the findings of research on the impact of variations in the availability of food across communities differentiated by socio-economic status and the role this may play in inequalities in diet and nutrition.
This paper uses data from the Irish National Health and Lifestyle Survey to estimate multi-level models of the impact of distance to different kinds of food outlets and density of shops on the diet of individuals measured by the DASH scale of dietary quality. Results indicate that more socio-economically advantaged individuals are likely to live closer to a supermarket and to consume a better diet as measured by the DASH score.
Controlling for individual and household characteristics, individuals who live closer to a supermarket or who live in an area with a higher density of supermarkets have a significantly better diet. Our findings confirm the importance of socio-economic gradients in diet and nutrition and suggest that food availability, may be a significant contributor to poorer dietary quality, particularly in less advantaged households.