Michael’s research topic is looking at the proportion distribution among types of carbonated beverage drinkers between Hispanic and non-Hispanic Groups by weight categories. The carbonated beverage drinkers are categorized into three groups: 1) regular carbonated drinkers, 2) diet carbonated drinkers and 3) non-carbonated drinkers. Our hypothesis was that there is a difference in the proportion distribution among the three types of drinkers between Hispanic and non-Hispanic groups. To further investigate the hypothesis, the study used the dataset of two non-consecutive days of dietary intake using 24-hour recalls of 36,877 subjects from “What We Eat In America (WWEIA)” dataset from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 2005 and 2012. The statistical software SPSS was used to perform the analysis based on descriptive statistics and tests of two population proportions.
The results demonstrated that there was significantly higher proportion of carbonated beverage drinkers in the Hispanic group compared to the non-Hispanic group in underweight and normal weight categories. The higher weight categories, however, showed insignificant proportion differences between these two ethnic groups. In addition, we specifically focused on carbonated drinkers, which were categorized into 2 types: 1) regular carbonated drinkers and 2) diet carbonated drinkers. The results found that there was a significantly higher proportion of people who drank diet carbonated beverages in the non-Hispanic group compared to the Hispanic group in all weight categories, except for the “morbidly obese” category. In other words, there was a higher proportion of regular carbonated drinkers in the Hispanic group compared to non-Hispanic group. The proportion difference gets bigger in the higher weight categories. Continuing efforts will focus on the association between Hispanic group and carbonated beverage drinkers according to different weight categories.
