Foods of the Foreign Born in Relation to Health, by Bertha M. Cooke

Health-related foreign cuisine is a recipe written by a nutritionist Bertha M. Cooke. It is a guide for those who emigrated from Europe and other countries to America in the 19th century. According to a survey of Americanization carried out by Carnegie Corporation, Cook infiltrated the world of foreign culture by "investigating people related to meals." Foreign foods are concerned about the cultural differences of immigrants entering the United States in the 1920s and the social characteristics associated with the integration of these immigrants into American society.

How is the health status of native origin and foreign born persons compared? The two widely used measures of health outcome are five stages from excellent to bad, and general health by self-declaration based on the prevalence of important chronic diseases. Table 7-1 compares the local natal births using national health interview surveys in 1996 with self-filing of foreign births, and Table 7-2 shows a similar comparison of common chronic diseases 1. Because it is closely related to age, the data of these tables are stratified according to age

Using the general health self-assessment in Table 7-1, the health status of foreign born people in the United States appears to be slightly lower than the health of local people. These differences concentrate on the upper limit of this healthy scale. For example, on a conditional basis, the proportion of foreign births reporting that they are healthy or very healthy is about 4 to 5 percentage points lower than local births. The main exception is between the ages of 61 and 80, saying that a considerable number of foreign-born people are in poor health or in poor health.

This article is divided into six parts. The first part of the first part briefly explains the important health outcome of foreign born Americans and domestically born Americans. In the following sections we will address some of the important findings and assumptions generated by these findings on the health status of foreign born populations based on existing scientific literature. The two more important problems that arise are related to the mechanisms that influence health selectivity and the determinants of health trajectory after migration. With this in mind, the next section outlines some simple immigrant health choice theoretical models followed by the trajectory of immigrant health. In the following section we will use the data from the new immigration survey to provide new information on the diversity of the health outcome of new immigrants to the United States.