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Record W7118961810 · doi:10.22452/mjes.vol62no2.4

Factors Influencing Expenditure on Unhealthy Foods Among the Urban Poor in Malaysia

2025· article· W7118961810 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Yong Kang Cheah, Mohd Jamil Sameeha, Che Wel Che Aniza, Mohd Sakri Anis Munirah, Sivabalan Shashidharan, Adila Saptari, Sirinya Phulkerd, Elaine Q. Borazon, Bee Koon Poh

Bibliographic record

VenueMalaysian Journal of Economic Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldMedicine
TopicObesity, Physical Activity, Diet
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersInternational Development Research Centre
KeywordsConsumption (sociology)Unhealthy foodGovernment (linguistics)Chronic diseaseSocioeconomic statusNon-communicable disease

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Consumption of unhealthy foods possesses harmful effects on health, thereby increasing the disease burden. If low-income people, especially those living in urban areas, do not make efforts to reduce their consumption on unhealthy foods, the health‒economic costs borne by them will rise. To date, there is a growing number of Malaysian studies that examine factors affecting consumption expenditure on unhealthy foods, but none has paid attention to the urban poor. The objective of this study is to narrow this research gap. A seemingly unrelated regressions model was utilised to estimate the effects of sociodemographic and health factors on expenditure of oil and fats, processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages and alcoholic drinks. Income and household size were positively associated with expenditure on unhealthy foods. Individuals who were between 61 and 70 years old had higher expenditure on unhealthy foods than their younger counterparts. The Chinese spent less on certain unhealthy foods compared to the Malays. Being employed, having tertiary-level education, being married and living with chronic diseases increased spending on unhealthy foods. These findings suggest that the Malaysian government should consider increasing the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages and using health campaigns to educate the urban poor about the risks of unhealthy foods.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.038
Threshold uncertainty score0.075

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.311
Teacher spread0.277 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueMalaysian Journal of Economic StudiesSame topicObesity, Physical Activity, DietFrench-language works237,207