urbanity consumption obesity alcohol cigarettes

Obesity, alcohol abuse, and smoking account for a significant fraction of all health-related problems around the world. Understanding which people are most at risk of consuming too much food, alcohol, and tobacco is valuable information for those attempting to tackle these problems. This paper attempts to estimate the effect urbanity has on the consumption of the three goods. Accordingly, the central research question states: “What is the relationship between urbanity and obesity, alcohol abuse, and smoking rates?”. Studying urbanity is especially relevant to modern society with cities growing ever larger and with an increasingly high percentage of the total population living in highly urban environments. Previous literature often examines differences in consumption of a single good or health problem between urban and rural areas. This research goes further by looking at a range of different goods allowing for comparisons and judgement in terms of consumption in general. This paper examines the relationship between urbanity and consumptive behaviour using both OLS and Logistic regressions looking at obesity, alcohol consumption, and tobacco consumption. The data is comprised of over 6000 respondents in the Netherlands between 2008 and 2018. The results suggest that urbanity does not promote consumption of any form. Urbanity is negatively correlated with obesity, uncorrelated with alcohol consumption and inconclusive regarding tobacco consumption. The main contribution of this paper to the current literature is that urbanity does not a have a unilateral effect on consumptive behaviour.