The NutritionStudy dataset contains data collected from a cross-sectional study that aimed to investigate the relationship between personal characteristics and dietary factors, and plasma concentrations of retinol, beta-carotene, and other carotenoids.
Study subjects were patients who had an elective surgical procedure during a three-year period to biopsy or remove a lesion of the lung, colon, breast, skin, ovary, or uterus that was found to be non-cancerous. Which set of hypotheses should be used for testing this claim?
Is there evidence that all patients who have this elective surgical procedure, as represented by the sample in this study, have a mean cholesterol intake of less than 250 mg per day? Since we are interested in looking at a hypothesis test for a single mean, we would like to use a t-distribution. How many degrees of freedom would the null distribution have?