Research On The Impact Of Education On Health Outcome Under The Food Path

As two important forms of human capital,there is a positive correlation between education and health.Acccording to the human capital model proposed by Grossman(1972),in a variety of input factors,education is the most important environmental variable,which determines the production efficiency.It is important to know that the direct effect of education on health,but it is more valuable to explore the pathway through education to health.It will provide accurate direction for the formulation of public policies.Based on the micro perspective,this desertation explore the influence mechanism of education on health from the pathway of food and nutrition intake.The thesis is committed to solve four problems.First,the food and nutrition intake as an important factor affecting the health,what is the relationship between education and food consumption/nutrition intake?Second,is the level of education and at which stage of development as a key variable to affect food intake?Third,is food and nutrition intake as an important pathway to explain the relationship between education and health?Fourth,if established,how does education play a role?That is,the difference level of dietary knowledge and the difference efficiency of nutrition information are the key influencing factors in academic education?Using China Health and Nutrition Survey(CHNS)and survey data in Beijing,the main conclusions are as followed:First of all,the food and nutritional status in China has changed to the fourth stage of nutrition transition.Food consumption structure has undergone significant changes and the increasing amount of food consumption and the variety does not necessarily bring about reasonable nutrition structure.Secondly,increasing income makes less restriction of food consumption,but it does not necessarily lead to the improvement of food consumption structure.The food consumption "two-stage" model shows that the increase in income has changed the traditional food consumption structure,which increase the health risks due to excessive consumption of animal foods and shortage of plant food consumption.While,the level of education has improved the dietary structure,which reflect id inhibited consumption of animal food and increasing plant food consumption.Thirdly,the main reason for the improvement of nutrition structure is changing from income to education.The improvement of income has no positive effects on the improvement of fat structure,and the improvement effect of education on fat structure has been shown.Panel data quantile regressions show that the improvement effect of education on nutrition structure is mainly through the influence of fat intake,that is,the inhibition of the total amount of fat intake and the increasing proportion of plant fat intake.Fourthly,this thesis has constructed the diet balance index(DBI)with multi dimension.The DB1 has reflected that dietary quality in China has been improved from 1997 to 2011.Now the main problems of dietary quality is from insufficient intake of nutrients to dietary structure problems.The dynamic analysis results show that the regulation effect of education on insufficient diet and unbalanceddiet is increasing,however,the regulation effect of income has declined.For the cause of non infectious chronic diseases(NCD),the excessive dietary intake,education has played an important role to reduce the excessive degree,while income has played the negative effect of excessive degree.Fifthly,education can improve the quality of food and improve the quality of health by improving the level of nutrition knowledge.The results of simultaneous equation model show that there is a significant positive relationship between education and dietary knowledge.The indirect effect of education to improve dietary quality by improving dietary knowledge accounts for the total effect of 51.95%;the indirect effect of education to improve health has promoted the total effect of 83%by improving dietary quality.Last but not least,the search frequency for nutrition information in Beijing is relatively high,and the mass media is the main channel for consumers.The increasing level of consumers’education has a significant positive impact on the search of nutrition information.Establishing two equations:nutrition information stock function and food consumption function,we use Heckman "two steps" and find that the level of education is an important variable to affect consumers’ nutrition information quantity;nutrition and health information has a certain influence on food consumption frequency,and there is a selection bias of information variables.When controlling the effect of education through the "information efficiency",the coefficient of education decreased significantly,which indicate that nutrition information is the key channel of education affect the behavior of food consumption.The contribution of this thesis includes two aspects.First,we provide an evidence from food and nutrition to further understand the effect of education on health.The results have important significance to the public policy of nutrition education and health intervention.This study not only from the food and nutrition path,dividing into three dimensions-food consumption,nutrient intake and dietary quality,to explore the mechanism of educationon health,but also from the"information efficiency" channel to find how education play the role to improve dietary quality.That is,behind academic education,there is much difference in dietary nutrition knowledge and information efficiency.These empirical results willprovide a basis for accelerating the improvement of nutrition and chronic disease control.The second contribution is about the method.The supply and demand of nutrition information are relatively high in China,and it is proper to disscuss the effect of information on food consumption.However,the domestic research on this field is rarely little and there is no empirical evidence from the micro perspective.The contribution of this study lies in developing the framework including nutrition information into and food consumption behavior.Moreover,we focus on the endogeneity variables--nutrition information and confirm that there is an estimation error without correcting selection bias of nutrition information.