Food intake and mortality in the United States

Patterns of food intake and cause-specific death rates were compared for population groups of the United States for 1965, the first year for which national files are available. Aging was a much more important determinant of death rates than type of food eaten. There were no strong patterns of rank correlations of food intake and cause of death, but there was a preponderance of positive rank correlations for alcohol. This, together with similarities of age distributions of alcohol intake and death rates for causes related to alcohol, suggested the hypothesis that alcohol was associated with increased mortality. Other than this, because of the limited power of the exploratory statistical procedures applied, the hypothesis that there were health differences in people eating different foods could be neither accepted nor rejected.