Are the Slimmer More Wasteful? The Correlation between Body Mass Index and Food Wastage among Chinese Youth

8Citations
Citations of this article
13Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

Abstract

With the economic growth and living standard improvement, food waste has become in-creasingly common among Chinese youth. To test whether body size affects the food waste performance of youth, we examined university students as representative of the Chinese youth and conducted a large-sample survey in 29 universities across 29 provinces. Based on 9192 questionnaires collected from Chinese college canteens, we found that body size was correlated with food waste. The smaller the body mass index (BMI) value, the higher the likelihood of plate waste, the higher the amount of waste, and the higher the ratio of food waste. Heterogeneity analyses revealed that BMI exerted a more significant impact on males than females, as well as a more substantial impact on northerners than southerners. Robust tests using other proxies to measure body size, robust re-gressions based on the new adjusted samples, and robust tests with an instrumental variable to overcome the endogenous issue suggested that the slimmer participants tended to be more wasteful. Hence, this study confirms that the slimmer youth tend to leave plate waste and waste more food per capita per meal. This study is the first attempt to analyze food wastage from the perspective of BMI in China to our best knowledge, and it provides a unique viewpoint for understanding young people’s food wastage.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Qian, L., Li, F., Liu, H., & Wang, L. (2022). Are the Slimmer More Wasteful? The Correlation between Body Mass Index and Food Wastage among Chinese Youth. Sustainability (Switzerland), 14(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031411

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free