Health News Environment and the Distribution of Diet Quality

This article investigates the relationship between the health news environment and the healthfulness of consumers’ food purchases. We estimate an unconditional quantile regression model using household-level purchase data from 2015–2018 and find that more health information is associated with a better diet. The relationship is slightly stronger at the lowest quantile of the Healthy Eating Index distribution, although we cannot reject equivalence with the estimate at the mean for most quantiles. Further, the association between health information and diet quality is weaker in households with higher education, implying that high education households are less likely to be affected by media information.