Impact Research Of Socioeconomic Factors On Micronutrients Intake For Rural Residents

According to the comparison between "National Developing Plan on Food and Nutrition in China (2001-2010)" and the nutrition survey conducted in the past several decades in China's rural areas, there was a huge gap between them. Although the family living standards had been gradually moving to the well-off, underfeeding of some nutrients was still a serious problem, especially for some selected micronutrients. Well, from economics perspective, the entry point for finding the factors which had great influences on nutrients intake would be looking for the factors that affected the major food consumption. These factors would first decide the food preferences, and then through the actual purchasing and consumption behaviors impacted people's final nutrients'intake. According to this logic idea this paper used qualitative and quantitative methods to calculate the impacts of factors on rural households'micronutrients intake, whereby proposing appropriate policy recommendations.After qualitative and quantitative analysis we jump to conclusions that: ? The socioeconomic factors had great influences on nutrients intake of rural residences considering the nine provinces'sample.The relationship between family size and nutrients intake were positive, indicating nutritional level increased with meal consumption and family size.Family annual net income had positive relation with nutrients intake. Low revenue family also had a low intake level for most of the nutrients. At the same time, the impact of socioeconomic factors on intake showed a piecewise phenomenon which meant for some very low level intake nutrients the income gap would lead severe intake differences between high and low income families.Family average age was a factor that had different relations with different nutrients. For Vitamin A and Ca the sign was negative and for others the sign was positive. According to "National Developing Plan on Food and Nutrition in China (2001-2010)" and the nutrition survey data, Vitamin A and Ca intake were extremely low during the past decades; this trend was ever deteriorating as family average age grows.As an influential factor, education level had a very unclear impact on nutrients intake, which is somehow inconsistent with empirical knowledge. One reason is associated with sample grouping and the other is related to the fact that very rare nutritional knowledge was taught during the basic educational stage. The potential for education was not fulfilled.In the final part of this paper some prospects were presented including modeling, measurement methods extensions and sample expansion, the author also put forward some other feasible research ideas for this topic.