Why Is Adherence to Dietary Guidelines Socially Stratified among Adults? The Role of Declarative and Nondeclarative Cultural Capital

Cultural capital is theorized to comprise both a declarative (i.e., deliberate/conscious) and a nondeclarative (i.e., automatic/unconscious) element, also referred to as “embodied.” While the latter is considered crucial in everyday health-related choices and in explaining why members of the higher strata more often make healthier ones, extant quantitative research has been unable to empirically measure it. This study implemented a novel method that measures nondeclarative cultural capital using implicit association tests and embedded it within a high-quality panel drawn randomly from the official Dutch population register ( N = 2,436). Both declarative and nondeclarative cultural capital prove to be independently associated with adherence to dietary guidelines and contribute to the relationship between educational attainment and adherence to dietary guidelines. This analysis more validly tests common theorizing on cultural capital’s role in stratified health patterns and suggests it is larger than assumed based on research solely relying on measures of declarative cultural capital.