252 Diet and Health
larger quantities of food or shifts in the types of foods, changes in income will have
less effect on dietary structure.
A related point is that while the GNP–fat intake relationship has flattened, it
is shown elsewhere that there remain in all countries important relationships
between income and fat consumption at the individual and household level.^25
A second apparent relationship between income and diet is that as income
increases (beyond the point where total food energy needs are met), people spend
more per food item,^26 partly to obtain higher quality. As many authors have shown,
food demand is much more price- and income-elastic among the poor than among
higher-income groups.26,27 Changes in diet with increased income also relate to the
reduced time needed to consume higher quality and higher priced goods that have
undergone more processing before purchase.^28
Income has been and will continue to be an important identifier of groups at risk
of either nutritional deficiency or nutritional excess. Income and more complex meas-
ures of socioeconomic status that incorporate other dimensions of social and eco-
nomic well-being, such as education, asset ownership, occupation and various more
qualitative measures of ‘status’, are useful in identifying problems of deficit in all soci-
eties and problems of excess associated with the pattern of degenerative disease.
For lower-income countries, a crucial dimension of the relationship between
socioeconomic status and nutrition is the distribution of chronic disease risk factors
Source: Regressions run with food balance data from FAOUN; GNP data from the World Bank
Figure 12.4 Relationship between the percentage of energy from fat and GNP per
capita, 1962 and 1990