Can environmental signals influence dietary Behaviours?The impact of governmental green development attention on dietary diversity among older adults

Against the backdrop of simultaneous national agendas for green transition and healthy ageing, the nutritional behaviour of older adults is being reshaped by emerging forms of institutional governance. Drawing on four waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS, 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2018), which are linked to the full texts of provincial government work reports from 22 provinces, this study constructs an index of "governmental green development attention" to rigorously assess whether provincial-level prioritization of green development is associated with dietary diversity among older adults. Baseline estimates from two-way fixed-effects models show that, after controlling for both individual- and provincial-level covariates, higher governmental attention to green development is significantly associated with greater dietary diversity in later life. We further identify three channels through which this association appears to operate: (i) heightened agenda salience and social participation; (ii) the framing of "green" as "healthy" and the diffusion of corresponding consumption norms; and (iii) improvements in public environmental conditions and basic service provision. A battery of robustness checks-including multilevel and random-effects specifications, the inclusion of province-year interactions, adjustments to the operationalization of the core explanatory variable, and double machine learning (DML) estimates of causal effects-consistently supports the main findings. Additional analyses show that the supply-side dimension of green transition exerts the strongest influence; that the volume of granted green patents is likewise positively associated with dietary diversity; and that the relationship between policy attention and dietary balance exhibits an inverted U-shape. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the association is markedly stronger among men, older adults who do not live alone, and residents of provinces with a higher share of secondary industry in GDP, suggesting that certain subgroups are more responsive to institutional environmental signals. Taken together, this study, grounded in the logic of limited attention, traces a "policy signal - cognitive/behavioural response" transmission pathway, offering new evidence on the behavioural health spillovers of environmental governance and informing nutrition-oriented interventions for ageing societies.