Consume behaviour in Italy. Who spends more to buy Mediterranean diet?

Mediterranean diet is a term used to describe the traditional eating habits of peo- ple around the Mediterranean and that refers to a healthy eating model, with sig- nificant nutrition and health benefits. However, many studies have emphasised an increasing erosion of the Mediterranean diet heritage, also in Italy. Starting from the assumption that evolution of human nutrition, if it occurs rapidly, can only be conceptualised as a social phenomenon, this study intends to explore the relation- ship between purchase behaviour for typical Mediterranean diet food and some so- cioeconomic and geographic characteristics of the Italian households. Italy’s food purchase microdata in 2013 were used to describe three different pur- chasing behaviours among households and a multinomial logit model was applied to model nominal outcome variables in relationship with socioeconomic variables. Re- sults suggest that families with older and more educated respondents have a higher probability to purchase Mediterranean diet food, while spending more on out-of-home eating or living far away from an urban area, seems to reduce this probability.