ABSTRACT
Driven by the goal of promoting individual well-being in the country, the Ministry of Health and Welfare of the Taiwanese government has been administering an annual Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan (NAHSIT) since 1993 to understand the contemporaneous state of health and nutrition of its people. A few years ago, a team of researchers decided to put the survey to novel use (Chang, Chen, Wahlqvist, & Lee, 2011). Creatively, they took the answers of the representative 1,841 elderly respondents (aged 65 and above) from the 1999–2000 surveys and linked them to the country’s National Death Registration records from the following decade (1999–2008). The results were astounding. The researchers found that elderly respondents who shopped daily had a 27% lower risk of death than the least frequent shoppers, with the effect being stronger for males (28%) than for females (23%).
