14 DAY TRIAL // An international group of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom has determined in a new study that obese teen girls tend to have poorer academic performances. The same correlation is valid for boys as well, but to a smaller extent. This is just the latest in a series of studies aimed at looking at childhood obesity from a public health issue perspective.
While the health effects of teen obesity have been investigated thoroughly over the years, the consequences of extra weight on learning performances in schools have been largely ignored. As obesity rates soared in both the US and the UK, especially since the 1990s, this issue has slowly become more and more important.
The new investigation was led by scientists with the University of Dundee, Strathclyde University, the University of Georgia, and Bristol University. The lead author of the investigation was Strathclyde childhood obesity prevention specialist John Reilly. He says that 25 percent of children in the UK become obese by the time they turn 12.
Reilly and his group investigated data covering around 6,000 adolescents in the United Kingdom, following test subjects from the ages of 11 through 16. During the research, scientists analyzed their body-mass indexes and how they evolved over time. The group was also able to correlate obesity with social factors such as socioeconomic status and determine how they influence each other.
In a paper published in the March 11 issue of the esteemed International Journal of Obesity, the team explains that roughly 71 percent of children were of normal weight when the investigation began, whereas 15 percent of them were obese. At ages 11, 13, and 16, the kids took English, math, and science academic exams, and the team analyzed the connection between BMI and school performances.
“The similarities between the environment, the culture, [and] school systems between the US and the UK are more similar than may be obvious,” Reilly says. “There is nothing about this [study] that is specific to the U.K.,” agrees the director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University, David Katz. He was not a part of the research team.
The team included factors such as IQ, menstruation cycles, and socioeconomic status in their assessment of the girls, and determined that those who were obese at 11 performed worse in academic settings at all three ages than their peers who had a normal weight at the beginning of the study.
In the United States, obesity rates are appalling, with roughly 21 percent of children between the ages of 12 and 19 classified as obese, as opposed to just 5 percent of the same population in the 1980s, NPR reports.
“We need to make eating well the default. We need to make physical activity a default. And we need to address […] the hypocrisy of a culture where the First Lady is focused on childhood obesity, but we aggressively market French fries and Coca Cola,” Katz concludes.