“The influence of dietary awareness on the relationship between education and health behaviour.”

A lot of research has been done to study and explain the education-health gradient, which is the relationship between education and health. The higher educated appear to have a higher life expectancy and live more years in good health. Several explanations for this education-health gradient can be given from the literature: Poor health leads to low levels of education, third factors increase both health and education and higher education leads to an improved health. This thesis focuses on estimating the effect of education and specific knowledge on health measures and thereby tries to extend the existing literature. Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2010) try to explain the relationship between education and health behaviour. They show that specific knowledge about smoking and drinking leads to a decrease of the education-health gradient in the corresponding health behaviours. Besides smoking and drinking, overweight is a major health problem in many countries. This paper investigates the question to what extent diet related knowledge influences the education-health gradient in diet related health behaviour. To give an answer to this research question we first use a linear regression model to estimate the effect of education on diet related health behaviour. Education has a significant negative influence on BMI and a significant positive influence on the change that people find it important to choose a healthy diet and maintain a healthy weight. Consequently, questions about dietary knowledge are added to the regression in order to estimate the possible change in the effect of education on the different health behaviours. Entering the knowledge questions leads to a significant and mostly large reduction of the influence of education on these health behaviours. Second, we use a linear regression model to estimate the effects of these health behaviours (BMI and the importance of people to choose a healthy diet and maintain a healthy weight) on an individual’s state of health. BMI has a significant negative effect on the state of health, whereas the reported importance of people to choose a healthy diet and maintain a healthy weight has a significant positive effect on their state of health. Concluding, we could state that dietary awareness has a large influence on diet related health behaviours and that these diet related health behaviours have a significant impact on the present state of health. So the education-health gradient in diet related health behaviour is to a quite large extent influenced by dietary awareness.