Poor diet causes public health burden across the globe. Dietary supplements can be taken to help with this, but they have not been thoroughly tested on children, so unknown side effects may occur (NCCIH, 2021). Health insurance status is one variable that may influence a child’s general diet, as it may be a signifier of other factors such as socioeconomic status. We posed a question asking if health insurance status influences a child’s ability to take dietary supplements. This question is relevant for the field as we believe that discovering factors that may influence an individual’s ability to better their diet through dietary supplements can lead to change in availability of these items. To conduct this project, we used data collected from the 2017 to 2018 National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) database. We then narrowed the data in SAS. A t-test, chi-square test, and logistic regression was calculated to draw results. We found race, education, gender, ratio of family income to poverty, and insurance to be significant predictors of a child’s ability to take dietary supplements. Further analysis through logistic regression revealed that race and insurance status are statistically significant influences on a child’s ability to take dietary supplements. In conclusion, health insurance does influence a child’s ability to take dietary supplements. However, it is nearly impossible to account for all confounding variables. NHANES does not have equal probability random sampling, possibly resulting in skewed data. Lastly, there are missing values in the data, as we did not have a single participant in our age range without health insurance. This calls for further investigations looking specifically at groups who were not equally sampled in our particular dataset.
Authors: Tara Soria and Cat Dennison
Faculty Advisor: Saruna Ghimire, Sociology and Gerontology
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