Young adults with lower education or income level are at a higher risk of becoming overweight or obese, says a new study.
It found that 25 per cent of young adults became overweight or obese.
Emerging adulthood is a critical time period for excess weight gain: Excerpts from the journal
- Researcher Deborah Rohm Young of Kaiser Permanente Southern California, Department of Research and Evaluation said, “Emerging adulthood is a critical time period for excess weight gain due to a variety of factors, including many teenagers leaving home for college and having more freedom and access to food.”
- “Our study found that living in a disadvantaged place puts teens at an increased risk for being overweight or obese. Although we did not explore potential reasons for this increase, factors may include cultural norms, as well as lack of access to public parks and grocery stores,” added Young in the paper published in the journal Pediatric Obesity.
Factors of obesity:
- Social determinants of health, which are the conditions in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
- Obesity count is based on the gender-specific body mass index (BMI) for age growth charts developed by the Centres for Disease Control
- Also, females and blacks had almost 1.7 and 1.3 times more risk to be overweight or obese compared with males and whites, respectively.
About the research:
- For the study, the researchers examined the health records of 22,823 ethnically diverse individuals who were in the age group of 18 years for four years with normal weight based on BMI less than 25
- Over a period of four years, researchers found that about 23 per cent of the normal-weight teenagers with low education living in neighbourhoods became overweight and about 2 per cent of those became obese who are living in lower income neighbourhoods.