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ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9803-7439
Access Type
Open Access Thesis
Document Type
thesis
Degree Program
Resource Economics
Degree Type
Master of Science (M.S.)
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Month Degree Awarded
May
Abstract
The United States has implemented many policies to target obesity. Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has mandated that restaurants must label the calorie content of the food they provide on menus and menu boards. Previous literature suggests that this policy will cause a small subset of consumers to improve the nutritional quality of the food they consume. Restaurants’ responses to the policy are not as well studied but existing literature suggests that menu items become slightly healthier after the introduction of various local policies. This paper seeks to assess the impact of a nationally-instituted nutrition labeling policy on fast-food nutritional content. We find evidence that restaurants both improve the healthfulness of pre-existing food items and introduce new food items of substantially lower nutritional quality.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/17658761
First Advisor
Emily Wang
Second Advisor
Nathalie Lavoie
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Reed, Joshua, "The Effect of Nutrition Labelling on Fast-Food Nutritional Content" (2020). Masters Theses. 942.
https://doi.org/10.7275/17658761
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/942