Food is trashy, but stores to a dollar do not ruin our diet, study allegations

Good news for good business hunters: new research shows that if the food purchased in dollars stores is generally less healthy, customer diets do not suffer greatly.

Scientists at TUFTS University and the USDA economies research have collaborated for the study, which followed food purchasing habits of nearly 200,000 US families. They found that an increasing number of people buy food from a dollar stores, especially people with lower income. At the same time, the overall quality of the food was not significantly different between those who buy and do not purchases in these points of sale.

Dollar stores have become an omnipresent presence in the United States in recent decades. Research has shown how these stores reshaped the local economy, especially in small cities. For the new study, the researchers wanted to have a better idea of how they changed our diet.

To this end, they have analyzed the annual data of a representative sample at the national level of household food purchases of Americans. They also used USDA data to assess the quality of the foods purchased in people’s stores.

According to the study, Dollar Store Foods represented 3.4% of the total calories of a household in 2008, almost 6.5% by 2020. People of color, people living in rural areas and those who have lower income were more likely to buy food in dollar stores.

As other research shows, purchases of food in stores are less healthy than foods purchased elsewhere. These stores are less likely to transport fresh products, for example, and more likely to have candies, snacks and other processed foods. But strangely, the quality of people’s diets has not changed much, that it ate dollar foods.

People who said they had never bought food in dollar stores had a healthy food score of 50.5, for example, while people who bought the most in these stores had a score of 46.3 (the scale goes to 100). On average, even customers of the most frequent stores in dollars have still obtained more than 90% of their calories at home elsewhere.

The results suggest that the impact of these stores on the health of Americans is more complicated than it was supposed to, according to the researchers. People who buy in these stores seem to change their food purchasing behavior in other respects. “Although foods purchased in dollars stores are less healthy, households can compensate for healthier purchases elsewhere,” they wrote in their article, published Monday in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Researchers note that certain cities and districts have taken measures to limit the growth of these stores. But given their results, they argue that more studies are necessary to understand exactly how these companies shape people’s eating habits.

“We need more data on the real effects of stores to a dollar on a healthy diet, because some communities can put the political cart in front of the horse,” said a principal researcher Sean Cash, economist at the tuffs’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, in a statement from the university.