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Abstract
This paper uses stochastic dominance to measure changes in the distribution of overall dietary
quality in the U.S. over the period 1989{2008. Diet quality is often used as as a proxy for
wellbeing and an outcome variable for a wide variety of interventions. For the population as a
whole, we find significant improvements in diets across all levels of dietary quality. Further, we
find improvements for both low-income and higher-income individuals alike. We show that the
improvements vary between these groups with regards to the timing and distributional location.
Further, we find that over half of the improvement for all individuals can be explained by changes
in food formulation and changes in demographics.