COLUMBUS – Researchers at OSU have confirmed what we all suspected: Rich people eat fast-food too.
“It’s not mostly poor people eating fast food in America. Rich people may have more eating options, but that’s not stopping them from going to places like McDonald’s or KFC,” says Jay Zagorsky, co-author of the study and research scientist at The Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research
Zagorsky conducted the study with Patricia Smith of the University of Michigan-Dearborn. It was recently published online and will appear in the November issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology.
Zagorsky and Smith used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which has questioned the same group of randomly selected Americans since 1979. About 8,000 people who were in their 40s and 50s were asked in the 2008, 2010 and 2012 surveys how many times in the past seven days they had eaten food from a fast-food restaurant.
About 80 percent of those in the lowest 10 percent of income ate at a fast-food restaurant at least once during the three-week survey period, compared to about 85 percent of those who were ranked near the middle and about 75 percent of those in the top 10 percent, Zagursky and Smith wrote.
The lowest 10 percent ate about 3.6 fast-food meals during the period, compared with 3.0 meals for the richest 10 percent of participants.
People whose income or wealth changed dramatically during the four years of the study, whether going way up or way down, didn’t affect their eating habits.
“If you became richer or poorer, it didn’t change how much fast food you ate,” Zagorsky said.
Overall, 79 percent of respondents ate fast food at least once and 23 percent ate three or more meals during any one of the weeks recorded in the study.
One hallmark of the heavy users of fast food was a lack of time. The study found that fast-food eaters tended to have less leisure time because they were more likely to work and work more hours than non-fast-food eaters.