2013 Health Care and Nutrition Study (HCNS)

Note: The 2013 HRS Health Care and Nutrition Mail Study contains questions about health care access, food purchases, food consumption and nutrition (including vitamins and other supplements). In November 2013, questionnaires were mailed to a subsample of 12,418 HRS respondents. The sample for the 2013 HCNS consists of all living HRS respondents who were not included in the 2013 Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS). The field period for the 2013 HCNS was late November 2013 through early May 2014. The data file for the HCNS contains data for 8,073 respondents. The simple response rate is 65 percent.

The HCNS - Nutrient Totals data set is a supplement to the 2013 HCNS. This data set uses the responses from Section C - Food and Nutrition, to calculate calorie and nutrient totals for each respondent across 215 nutrient variables. The HRS HCNS was based on the Harvard food frequency questionnaire originally proposed by Willett and colleagues, and these estimates of nutrient intake utilize the nutrient tables provided by the Harvard School of Public Health. For the Nutrient Totals data set we removed 38 respondents, as detailed in the data description, so the file contains data for 8,035 respondents.