Diet, Lifestyle and Mortality in China

The People's Republic of China is a large and heterogeneous country and as such has a remarkably high degree of geographical localization in disease mortality rates.

This book documents the results from a survey looking at patterns of mortality from various diseases in each of 65 mostly rural counties.

Over 367 dietary and lifestyle characteristics were measured, including a variety of nutritinal factors in blood, urine and food.

In one of the surveys reported here, randomly selected subjects, aged 35-64, provided blood samples, were interviewed about their dietary, smoking and reproductive histories and provided representative food samples for analysis.

In another, randomly selected households participated in a 3-day weighed food survey.

A primary objective of the project as a whole was to provide descriptive information.

Much of the data is simply listed; each listing accompanied by a map showing the geographical distribution of high and low values of the variable.

Correlaton co-efficients between many hundreds of variables have been calculated, yielding over 100,000 coefficients in all. The data is presented to allow identification of the huge number of relationships which exist between the ways people live and the way they die.