UKFood Combined Dataset: Statistical Matching of the Living Costs and Food Survey with the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, 2018-2019

<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px; background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);">The UKFood dataset </span><span style="background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px;">provides a statistical match of the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCFS) and the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), combining food purchases and expenditure at the household level with nutrient intake at the individual level. It was </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px; background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);">produced as part of the Imperial College Business School </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px;"><a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school/faculty-research/research-centres/centre-health-economics-policy-innovation/research/finch/">Fiscal INCentives for Health improvement: repurposing consumption taxes on food (FINCH) </a>project (funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)).</span><span style="background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px; background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);">The LCFS is a nationally representative survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), designed to collect information on household spending patterns across the entirety of the UK. It is widely used to produce official UK family spending and food consumption statistics. In particular, the Food Family module (conducted by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) records participants' food and drink purchases in a two-week diary, documenting quantities, expenditures, and nutrients for over 500 types of food. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250); font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px;">The NDNS, funded by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and conducted by NatCen and the University of Cambridge </span><span style="background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);">MRC Epidemiology Unit)<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px;">, gathers detailed information on food and nutrient intake from a representative sample of the UK population. This project employed statistical matching techniques to merge individuals from LCFS and NDNS, utilising a set of common variables in both datasets to create a new dataset containing household food expenditure and individual nutrient intake data. A predictive mean matching imputation technique facilitates the fusion of the two datasets that include samples from the same representative population and share a suitable subset of common variables for the 2018/19 fiscal year. The UKFood dataset encompasses a rich array of sociodemographic characteristics, including household size, ethnicity, tenure, marital status, sex, age, socioeconomic classification (SEC), UK regions, and the number of children in the household. Importantly, it also includes a range of nutrients at both individual and household levels (such as energy (kcal), protein, fat, carbohydrate, and sugar), enabling comparisons of nutrient purchases and intakes for a representative sample of the UK. This new dataset supports analyses of the impacts of fiscal policies, which necessitates an assessment of both household expenditure and finances, as well as individual nutrient intakes.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px; font-weight: bold;">Documentation</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px;">The UKFood User Guide, Raw Variables Guide and ReadMe file are available via the Documentation tab. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6px; background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250);">The Stata do-file information and codebook file are available for download alongside the data files, by registered UKDS users.</span></p>