Socioeconomic, demographic and geographic determinants of food consumption in Mexico

Abstract

What people eat affects public health and human wellbeing, agricultural production, and environmental sustainability. This paper explores the heterogeneity of food consumption patterns in an ecologically and culturally diverse country. Using a latent class approach (which creates clusters of individuals with homogeneous characteristics), we analyse a food questionnaire (from the National Health and Nutrition Survey) applied across Mexico. We identify four clusters of food consumption (staple, prudent, high meat and low fruit) and find that belonging to these clusters is determined by socioeconomic, demographic (age, sex) and geographic (region, urban/rural) characteristics. Maize and pulses tend to constitute a larger proportion of the diet of poor, rural populations living in the south, while urban populations eat more varied foods, including ingredients whose production systems tend to exert more pressure on natural resources (for instance, meat). Despite the importance given in the literature to the Mexican gastronomy and its diverse traditional regional diets, we find that only 6% of the population adopts a food consumption pattern resembling the traditional Mexican diet. Instead, most of the Mexican population has a food consumption pattern resembling a western diet, which is problematic in terms of public health and environmental sustainability.