CNCC Research Seminar|Air Pollution and Diet Quality: Evidence from Household Scanner Data

This paper examines the causal effects of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), using wildfire smoke exposure from 2010-2018 as a source of exogenous variation for air pollution. By linking nationwide satellite-based smoke plume data, ground-based pollutant measurements, and consumer scanner data for more than 120,000 U.S. households, we find no impacts of air pollution on overall diet quality or individual diet components. This suggests that air pollution levels might not be a substantial driver of household dietary choices. Our findings reveal a socioeconomic gradient in diet quality, with lower-income households, less-educated household heads, and counties with higher PM2.5 levels consistently exhibiting poorer diet quality. Moreover, we observe no evidence that the effects of air pollution vary across income, education, and county pollution levels.