Nutrition

The nutrition module uses a composite variable comprised of the frequency and amount of the consumption of fruit and vegetables.

Composite Variable

The variables available to us from Understanding Society on the quality of food consumption were wkfruit, fruitamt, wkvege, and vegeamt.

The equations to generate the nutrition composite are as follows:

fruit_intermediate = days_eating_fruit_per_week * fruit_per_day
veg_intermediate = days_eating_veg_per_week * veg_per_day

nutrition_composite = fruit_intermediate + veg_intermediate

This gives us a continuous nutrition score, composed of the sum of two proxy values for the amount of fruit and veg eaten per week. Unfortunately because the days_eating_<>_per_week variables are ordinal (levels = [Never, 1-3 days, 4-6 days, Everyday]) and not just the number of days, we can’t calculate an actual value for amount_per_week.

Transition Model

Predictor variables: - Sex - Age - Education - SF-12 - Labour state - Ethnicity - Household Income