What You Eat Is What You Are : Risk Attitudes, Time Preferences, and Diet Quality

This paper explores the relationships between overall diet quality and attitudes toward risk and time using a general population survey. Our survey combines (i) a state-of-the-art food frequency questionnaire with (ii) a choice-based preference module to elicit individual risk and time preferences. The survey was administered to a representative sample of the French population. Using a Hierarchical Bayes framework, we jointly estimate individual risk aversion and impatience parameters. We show that risk and time preferences significantly explain individual heterogeneity in key aspects of diet quality, even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics. We find that more impatient and more risk-seeking individuals have poorer overall diet quality, more impatient individuals have higher daily energy intake, and more risk-seeking individuals consume more alcohol