How the Popularization of Dietary Guidelines Affects Healthy Eating Behavior : Evidence from the Choice of Staple Food Structure in China

Long-term high consumption of refined grains is detrimental to human health. This study aims to assess the effects of dietary guidelines on healthy eating and provide policy insights for dietary structure transformation and healthy eating interventions by focusing on the microscopic effects of dietary guideline popularization on the choice of staple food structure of the population. The staple food structure considered in this paper consists primarily of a combination of refined grains (rice and white flour mainly) and coarse grains and potatoes in various proportions. For a sample of 102,464, this paper estimated using a multinomial logit model. We discovered that knowing the dietary guidelines can help residents choose a health staple food structure (including as many coarse grains and potatoes as possible), and a series of robustness tests confirm the results. Further analysis reveals that (a) knowing the dietary guidelines moderates the staple food choices of obese, urban-dwelling, and male groups, effectively improving these groups’ staple food choices; (b) knowing the dietary guidelines also promotes residents’ dietary diversity and vegetable intake; and (c) after addressing the endogeneity issue, the mechanism analysis shows that the dietary guidelines primarily promote residents’ healthy dietary choices by improving their dietary knowledge. Overall, this paper examines the health effects of dietary guidelines on residents’ staple food choices and demonstrates the significance of dietary guideline popularization and dietary knowledge based on dietary guidelines