Nutritional Impacts of targeted Food Payments in Early Life

Abstract

We evaluate the impact of the UK Healthy Start Scheme, one of few food policies targeting the early years, on the nutritional quality of families’ food purchases. Healthy Start is a targeted programme for low-income pregnant women and families with children under four. Its aim is to improve dietary quality in a context where one in ten children are obese by the start of primary school. We estimate changes in nutritional choices at eligibility onset (i.e., 10 weeks pregnant) as well as offset (i.e. when the child turns four). Using a staggered difference-in-difference design applied to nationally representative consumer scanner data, we compare choices of young families who meet the scheme’s means- tested eligibility criteria to those of ineligible low-income families with young children. We show that Healthy Start increases the nutritional quality of food purchases among eligible households. The pre-existing gap of £1.10 weekly in fruit & vegetable spending is reduced by a third upon becoming eligible - providing 25 additional daily healthy calories from fruit & vegetables per person. Our key finding is that impacts persist even after families loose eligibility. Despite the monetary loss of up to 2% of income, fruit & vegetable purchases do not decline, suggesting that more than four year of exposure to Healthy Start lastingly increased preferences for healthier foods.

Joint paper with Britta Augsburg, Gabriella Conti, Christine Farquharson, Stephanie von Hinke, and Andrew McKendrick.