Americans’ diets may have become healthier and more diverse in the months since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to a new study led by researchers at Pennsylvania State University.
The study, published in PLOS ONE, found that state governments’ response to the pandemic with school closures and other lockdown measures led to citizens’ diet quality improving by up to 8.5% and food diversity increasing by up to 2.6%.
Study co-author Edward Jaenike, a professor of agricultural economics in the College of Agriculture, said the findings provide a snapshot of what Americans’ diets and eating habits might look like if eating in restaurants and cafeterias were almost completely eliminated.
“When restaurants were closed, our diets got a little more diverse and a little more healthy. One of the lessons post-pandemic is that there’s some evidence that reducing spending at restaurants, even when not caused by the pandemic, can improve Americans’ dietary diversity and health.”
Edward Jaenike, professor of agricultural economics, College of Agriculture
Before the pandemic, the average American diet was generally considered unhealthy, according to the researchers: According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the nation’s eating habits remain well below guideline recommendations, and the nation’s average Healthy Eating Index score improved only slightly between 2005 and 2016.
And before the pandemic, the team was working on a grant-funded project asking how people would feed themselves after a major global catastrophe, such as an asteroid impact or nuclear war. In particular, Jenicke’s team was tasked with investigating how consumers and food retailers would behave in the event of such a disaster.
“Initially, the most impactful events we could study using actual real-world data were hurricanes and other natural disasters,” Jenicke says, “but then the COVID-19 pandemic happened and we realized this event was an opportunity to study the closest thing to a true global catastrophe.”
For the study, researchers analyzed data from the Nielsen IQ HomeScan Consumer Panel on grocery purchases from 41,570 U.S.-representative households. The data consisted of the quantities and prices paid for all universal product codes purchased by each household during the study period.
Data was collected both before the pandemic began and after it caused schools, restaurants, and other facilities to temporarily close. Because states did not respond simultaneously to the pandemic, the researchers defined each household’s post-pandemic period as the number of weeks following the date their county of residence closed schools in 2020.
Jenike noted that this enabled the team to show the true causal relationship of school closures due to the pandemic, which occurred around the same time as restaurant and other food service closures.
“To establish causality, we first compared each household’s food purchases before and after the pandemic with the same household’s food purchases a year earlier,” Jenike said. “In this way, we controlled for each household’s food purchasing habits, preferences and idiosyncrasies.”
The researchers found that Americans’ dietary diversity (defined as how many different foods a person eats in a given period of time) increased slightly in the two to three months following pandemic-related school closures (March to June 2020, depending on the U.S. state).
They also found a temporary significant improvement in diet quality, meaning the foods purchased were healthier, as measured by how closely households followed the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Frugal Food Plan, which was designed to meet the healthy eating requirements recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
These patterns were found across households with different demographics, but the increases in these indicators were smaller for households with young children, those with lower incomes, and those without cars.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants were closed to dine-in customers, schools and cafeterias were closed, and many supermarket shelves were bare,” Jenicke said. “With roughly 50% of Americans’ food dollars spent on ‘eating out’ at restaurants and cafeterias, the pandemic has been a major shock to the food system.”
The researchers said there are several possible explanations for these findings: First, other studies have found that restaurant meals are often less healthy than meals prepared at home, so the dramatic reduction in meals eaten at or purchased from restaurants during the pandemic may have contributed to greater variety and healthiness of meals eaten at home.
Second, the global pandemic may have prompted some consumers to become more health conscious and purchase more healthful and diverse food products, the researchers said. Third, the pandemic has caused widespread disruptions to supply chains, so when familiar products sell out, consumers may have switched to new products that offer greater variety and health benefits.
Finally, while school and business closures may have caused many households to spend more time cooking and preparing meals than they did before, others, such as those with young children, may have less free time than they had before the pandemic.
Jenike said future studies could continue to explore further how different disasters affect purchasing and eating habits.
Douglas Renn, associate professor of environmental and resource economics at Pennsylvania State University, and Daniel Simanjuntak, a research associate at Newcastle University, were co-authors of the study.
Open Philanthropy supported this research.
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Journal References:
Simandjuntak DP, et al. (2024). Pandemic-induced changes in household-level food diversity and diet quality in the United States: PloS One. PloS One. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300839.
