Research

Job Market Paper

Small Bites, Big Effects? Snacking and Health in the U.S. Job Market Paper

Abstract American children’s diets fall well short of federal dietary guidelines. According to the Healthy Eating Index (HEI), children score a mean of 47 out of 100 against a guideline benchmark of 80, and the score declines by roughly ten points from childhood to adolescence. Snacking accounts for about a quarter of children’s daily calories and is a plausible driver of this deficit, but its causal effect is confounded by selection on unobservable preferences over food and health. Using NHANES data from 2003 to 2018, I implement a bunching design at zero snack consumption to recover the marginal causal effect of habitual snack intake on the HEI and on the BMI z-score. An additional 100 kcal of habitual snacking lowers the HEI total score by 0.52 points. Removing a typical adolescent’s 300 kcal of daily snacking would raise the score by about 1.6 points, roughly 5 percent of the 33-point distance from the mean to the guideline benchmark. The effect decreases with age and is homogeneous across income levels. I find no BMI effect, rejecting z-score changes larger than 0.019 (about 0.2 kg of adolescent body weight) per 100 kcal with 95 percent confidence. These results suggest that what children snack on matters more for diet quality than how much they snack, so the margin with room in it is replacing unhealthy snacks rather than removing them.

Links: Draft PDF

Working Papers

Health Effects of Food Away from Home

This paper estimates how eating food away from home (FAFH) affects health and diet quality for U.S. adults, using NHANES data. To separate the effect of the food from the fact that different kinds of people choose to eat out, it uses a bunching design at zero FAFH calories (Caetano et al., 2024) with a control function. For women, each additional 1,000 daily FAFH calories worsens body-shape, metabolic, and cardiovascular health indices. For men, these indices show no significant effect. Diet quality falls for both, the Healthy Eating Index drops 1.9 points for women and 1.3 for men.

Links: Draft PDF