Is Diet Quality Improving? Distributional Changes in the United States, 1989–2008

Abstract This article measures changes in the distribution of dietary quality among adults in the United States over the period 1989–2008. Diet quality is a direct input to health, is often used as a proxy for well‐being, and is an outcome variable for a wide variety of economic interventions. For the population as a whole, we find significant improvements across all levels of diet quality. Further, we find improvements for both low‐income and higher‐income individuals alike. Counterfactual distributions of dietary quality are constructed to investigate the extent to which observed improvements can be attributed to changes in the nutritional content of foods and to changes in population characteristics. We find that 63% of the improvement for all adults can be attributed to changes in food formulation and demographics. Changes in food formulation account for a substantially larger percentage of the dietary improvement within the lower‐income population (19.6%) vs. the higher‐income population (6.4%).