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According to new research by Mir M. Ali, an economist at the FDA’s Office of Regulations, Policy and Social Science, it’s because they’ve grown up around overweight parents and peers and therefore think their overweight status is, well, normal. The paper, coauthored with Aliaksandr Amialchuk and Francesco Renna, is called “Social Network and Weight Misperception Among Adolescents,” and is forthcoming in the Southern Economics Journal. From the abstract:
It is recognized that public health interventions targeted towards changing lifestyle behaviors to reduce overweight is a considerable challenge. It is important that individuals recognize their overweight status to be a health risk in order for an effective change in lifestyle behaviors to occur and growing evidence suggest that actual weight and perception of weight status often do not match especially among adolescents. In this paper, we explore the extent to which adolescents that are exposed to overweight parent and peers are likely to misperceive their weight status. Using data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents we estimate instrumental variable models with school level fixed effects to account for bi-directionality of peer influence and environmental confounders. Our results indicate that individuals who live in an environment that exposes them to overweight/obese parent and heavier peers are more likely to misperceive their weight status and think of themselves to be of lower weight than they actually are. Our analysis also revealed differential effect by gender and type of peers.
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In order to factor out genetics, would it not be better to do a study on the relationship between obese parents and their adopted children?
Nice point! I don’t think AddHealth has enough adopted children to explore this, but a bigger dataset like NHANES might. Another problem might be selection of adopted kids.
http://bit.ly/fA8OQJ Processed foods linked with lower IQ in children
People who question what foods they eat raise more intellectually capable kids? That’s the difference between correlation and causation. The link between processed foods and lower IQ’s may not be causal, since the study didn’t find any causal mechanism, but a parents awareness of what foods their child eats may relate to how the child is raised in general.
Also, GM foods have also been known to break down the immune system of test subjects, from people to animals. Lower IQS and sicker kids! I don’t think that it is orchestrated by one conglomerate trying to keep people down, but I definitely think that our education and corporate food infrastructure operate in a way to make that seem like the case. Public schools save money by making ketchup a vegetable: http://abcn.ws/dLOHkd
Idiocy that won’t fly in richer school districts, but the poor, (to which IQ test don’t really target) don’t have the free time to really fight this well. “Some theorists suggest that socioeconomic disadvantages are the main causes of… differences in IQ.” From here: http://bit.ly/aFAK9 Actually, in academic circles, most theorists think this.
And then we get junk science to make us feel better about this cycle of “food oppression.” I read an article that said that black people are better at handling a bad diet than white people, regardless of the hypertension and diabetes rate in that population. I bring up race, because in America, it is nearly synonymous with class. White folk in the same economic conditions have approximately the same levels of diabetes and stroke.
So the poor are kept unhealthy, told to accept ketchup as equivalent to spinach, and then we are surprised to find this: http://huff.to/g7IpAl Further, our healthy food isn’t as healthy as it used to be: http://bit.ly/hdG5wF and it costs more than even more unhealthy food: http://bit.ly/dPV41a
Our country is sick. It’s because of food. It’s because of food marketing. It’s because of government inaction. And somehow San Francisco is a jerk for trying to protect our unquestioning constituents: http://bit.ly/eTFLbE This is just another link to frustrate the whole thing: http://bit.ly/eTyQke
So rather than focusing on these kids who are buoyed by self confidence and ignorance combined, why the heck don’t we try to fix our food infrastructure, move away from crops whose nutritional value has dropped, and put producers of food closer to where people live and work?