Changing attitudes won't be easy. Junk food is tasty, simple to prepare and often costs less than healthy alternatives. Faced with these "present benefits," parents who are not focused on the future will almost certainly have a hard time resisting junk food's appeal. Michael Finke and Sandra Huston, both assistant professors in MU's Department of Consumer and Family Economics who specialize in consumers' health choices, have long been fascinated by the relationship between time orientation -- whether people are more focused on the present or on the future -- and their eating habits. How, Finke and Huston wondered, might a person's time orientation affect his or her investment in what they call an individual's "health capital"?

The researchers hypothesized that present-oriented individuals would be more likely to choose a risky diet. Why? Because these people feel compelled to emphasize present benefits rather than future costs.

To test their theory, Finke and Huston looked for measures that might determine a person's "future discount rate" -- that is, the degree to which they are interested in "living for the day" or "planning for tomorrow." Behaviors such as smoking, exercise and reading nutrition panels tend to be good measures for testing this form of time orientation. Smokers, for example, often show less concern than nonsmokers about their futures, and are thus said to have a high future discount rate. Exercise enthusiasts who read food labels are usually found at the other end of the scale: They are not discounting the future at all.

Finke and Huston reviewed data from three U.S. Department of Agriculture sources: the "Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals," the "Diet and Health Knowledge Survey," and the "Healthy Eating Index." Their analysis showed, as the researchers suspected, that adults with poor diets were more likely to be present-oriented. Poor-diet eaters are approximately 1.5 times more likely to smoke, 1.1 times less likely to exercise, 1.4 times less likely to use nutrition labels and nearly 2 times less likely to have college degrees. "If we combine indicators of time preference into a single factor, it is as important a predictor of diet quality as your income, race or where you live," Finke says.

He says also parents' future discount rates are an important predictor of their children's diet quality. "Research has shown a strong link between parental diet choices and the diet quality of their children," Finke says. "We know that there are many parents for whom the sacrifices in terms of convenience, cost and flavor are simply too high to make an investment in healthy eating."