14 DAY TRIAL // Following a three-year study conducted on White and Black teens (no Hispanics), researchers found out that being overweight or obese does not necessarily imply those individuals are more likely to be depressed than their lean, fitter peers.
The new work is only the last to add to a massive volume of literature on the topic. At this point, the international scientific community is divided between those who argue that obesity causes depression in teens, and those who say that no evidence of such a connection exists.
The link between body weight and mental health has been a disputed one, and studies proving both points of view right are continuously being published in esteemed journals, PsychCentral reports.
One interesting conclusion of the new work was that White teens were more likely to feel the negative psychological effects of obesity than Black adolescents were. In this study, experts only looked at cases of severe obesity, and disregarded individuals who were simply overweight.
Test participants, all of which were between grades 7 and 12, were divided into two groups. The first one was made up of 51 obese teens, while the other was made up of the same number of normal-weight adolescents. All test subjects were matched for age, gender, race and so on.
“People assume that all obese adolescents are unhappy and depressed; that the more obese a teen may be, the greater the impact on his or her mental health,” says scientist Elizabeth Goodman, MD.
“Our findings suggest this assumption is false,” adds the expert, who was also the lead author of the new study. Details of the work were published in the latest online issue of the esteemed scientific Journal of Adolescent Health.
“As clinicians, we treat the entire person – body and mind – and we can’t assume that weight loss will improve all our patients’ mental health or that negative feelings run hand-in-hand with obesity,” the investigator adds.
“Body size appears to have a greater impact on feelings of non-Hispanic white teens’ than non-Hispanic black teens. We should be particularly vigilant about assessing for depression during regular visits among this group,” she explains further.
Goodman now holds an appointment as a visiting professor of pediatrics at the Harvard University Medical School (HMS). She proposes that the best way to conduct research into this link is to used community-based subject samples, rather than ones taken from obesity clinics.
The HMS scientist explains that people who visit such clinics usually tend to think worse about themselves than obese people in communities do. This may be contributing to skewing the results of similar studies, conducted on people recruited from such clinics.