Abstract:
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Food preferences are important factors in personal heath, implying an instrumental relationship between food and health. Also in public health, changes of public food preference might affect causes of death distribution as well as average life expectancy. While, it is known that women who eat a lot of soybean products are three to four times more likely to develop liver cancer than those who eat only a small amount. It is because, though estrogen heightens the risk of breast cancer, it protects against liver cancer and excessive consumption of isoflavones may block this property. Considering those factors, we should not discuss correlations between food preference and cause of death on one-to-one correspondence but on many-to-many correspondence, that is, systematic correspondence. In this study, we propose a method for analyzing systematical correlations between food preferences and causes of death in public from estimated social environmental factors of food preference and death, which are estimated by applying the age-environment model to age-by-period data for food preferences and death rate, and show the results obtained by applying the proposed method to actual data in Japan.
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