A recent report released by the National Center for Health statistics describes the dietary habits of those age 60 and older. The report provides information on overall quality of diets as well as specific aspects. Dietary guidelines suggest that the typical woman should have 6 servings of grains, 3 servings of vegetables, 2 servings of fruit, 2-3* servings of dairy, and 2 servings of protein daily. *The number of servings depends on your age. Older children and teenagers (ages 9 to 18 years... Read Full Story

My predictions for West Virginia underestimated by a considerable margin the amount of the vote Clinton would win and I didn’t do nearly as well as some other prognosticators. A variety of factors that I didn’t consider in my estimates worked in her favor. First, West Virginia has a less educated population than any of the states with recent primaries. Obama does better with the college educated crowd than does Clinton. I really don’t think this is the direct reason why my estimates were off... Read Full Story

The Bureau of Labor statistics posted this nifty map showing unemployment rates for states on Friday. California, Michigan, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Washington D.C. currently have the highest levels of unemployment. In addition, Florida, Nevada, and Georgia have experienced a percentage point gain in unemployment over the past year. It's important to note that unemployment has a very narrow definition. To be unemployed a person has to not have been employed in the last week and to have... Read Full Story

A social trend that provokes nearly no one is the increased median age at marriage. Trends in the percent married by the end of their 25th year show remarkable declines in marriage in early adulthood. Fewer and fewer young adults marry in their early twenties. Almost everyone says that they would like to marry someday and most also say that they would be better off if they were married. Yet, most are content to put this off until some time later. If marriage is such a good... Read Full Story

Today's entry demonstrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same. You'd think that, given dramatic changes in the cost of of a gallon of gas, the political party in power, levels of unemployment, racial unrest, divorce, or whatever over the past 26 years there would have been wild fluctuations in levels of happiness. Nope. Maybe if I choose a different scale for the graph....nope. I have to think that 1984 wasn't a good year, but otherwise things are pretty stable... Read Full Story

A recent report published by the National Center of Health Statistics examines sleep patterns in the United States and the association between sleep and other health indicators. Interestingly, most (63%) people get the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep each night, but this leaves a substantial minority (about 38%) getting less sleep than recommended and a small proportion (9%) sleeping 9+ hours a night. Those getting 7-8 hours of sleep have the lowest rates of smoking, inactivity, and obesity... Read Full Story

I did farily well predicting the North Carolina and Indiana primaries just using exit poll and census data, especially if you ignore my delegate calculations. (Doh!) Let's see how dumb my luck was... I worked under the assumption that voting tendencies by race and gender would hold steady. And the table above shows that they did. If anything, Clinton grabbed a larger share of the white vote than expected. This was offset by the fact that the voting rates for whites were much... Read Full Story

It seems that the college admissions game continues to get more crazed every year. This is true not only among elite schools, but also public universities. Two issues make getting into a top college much more difficult in recent years. The first is the remarkable growth in postsecondary schooling. Nowadays, most high school graduates continue their educations after receiving their diplomas. Another factor has to do with the number of babies born approximately 18  years ago. Between 1985 and... Read Full Story

An interesting trend in family life, one that almost everyone knows about, is the growth in single parent families. So, it isn't much surprise to anyone that many households (60 percent in 2006) with a female householder contain children. It might be slightly more surprising to know that almost half of households with an unmarried male householder have children. Some might see this as evidence for a sudden increase in men taking custody of children in the event of divorce. It is not. No, this... Read Full Story

Reading various online sources, I see that many have impressions about whether religious fundamentalism or religious liberalism is increasing or on the decline. The General Social Survey, conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, has asked a representative sample of United States residents about their religious beliefs in every interview since 1972. In the early 1970s most responded that they had moderate beliefs and less than 20 percent claimed to hold... Read Full Story