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How to Live Longer?

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Submitted By heibai
Words 2986
Pages 12
How to live longer?
An analysis of the impact food consumption and healthcare may have on life expectancy.

Econ413
SP2011

Introduction
Life expectancy is important not only to individuals but also to the nation. To individuals, longer life expectancy gives people more time in their lives to do things they want and gives them opportunity to see their children and grandchildren grow up. To the nation, studying life expectancy helps the government plan for pension benefits and contributions. I want to analyze the impact of food consumption on life expectancy because today people care about eating healthier and America’s eating habit has been criticized for the consumption of too much unhealthy food. In order to measure the country’s eating habits, I used data over the past 40 years that includes annual meat consumption, fish consumption, milk consumption, fruits and vegetable consumption and etc. I will analyze the life expectancy over 1970-2008 and the corresponding food consumptions over that time period.
In addition to eating habits, I believe that the nation’s healthcare spending and GDP are important determinants of life expectancy. Excluding them will result in a biased model. Therefore, I also included healthcare and GDP as independent variables in my analysis.
Prior Research and Theory In the past few years, life expectancy and its determinants have been widely discussed in economics. In the U.S., life expectancy rapidly increased in the past century and led to a rapid aging of the American population (Shrestha 2006). According to Munnell (2004), the analysis of life expectancy is complex and the range of determinants is wide. In his research, he only reviewed some of the most likely factors. One of the major factors is National GDP, because a richer a country has more resources to dedicate to education, medical care, and other goods and services

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