Data

National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

Data sampling and sample size: Nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional survey of approximately 5,000 US residents.

Dataset description: NHANES is the largest health and nutritional survey in the United States, and includes child and adult data. NHANESincludes demographic, socioeconomic, dietary, and health-related questions. Contains What We Eat in America (WWEIA), the dietary intake interview component of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). WWEIA contains two 24 dietary recalls.

WIC Measures in dataset: WIC participation in the last 30 days and 1 year (includes total number of household participants receiving WIC). WIC measures are located in the Food Security section of Family Questionnaire.

Years available and frequency of data collection: Data becomes available every two years on odd years. Data is available from 1999 to 2022. The NHANES program suspended field operations in March 2020 due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As a result, data collection for the NHANES 2019-2020 cycle was not completed and the collected data are not nationally representative. Therefore, data collected from 2019 to March 2020 were combined with data from the NHANES 2017-2018 cycle to form a nationally representative sample of NHANES 2017-March 2020 pre-pandemic data.

Sample publication using dataset: Tester JM, Leung CW, Crawford PB. Revised WIC food package and children’s Diet Quality. Pediatrics. 2016;137(5). doi:10.1542/peds.2015-3557

Accessibility: NHANES data is free and publicly available. Guidance is available on the website for dataset use and analysis, including analytic weights.

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Date Added
August 31, 2023