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Abstract
A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest.
Highlights
Childhood obesity is a pressing public health and policy concern in the United States
There were insignificant differences between the analytic sample and the full population of NYC public elementary and middle school students, since our sample represents more than 93 percent of all public school students in grades K-8
This paper focuses on one year of data, for ease of exposition
Summary
Childhood obesity is a pressing public health and policy concern in the United States. The consequences for children are substantial, with long-term negative impacts on health and life chances (e.g., income, employment) [2] and potential short-term impacts on fitness, social and emotional development (at least partially driven by obesity-related stigma), and academic success [3, 4]. That the prevalence of child obesity is unevenly distributed across sociodemographic groups is of special concern, with disproportionate numbers of racial/ethnic minorities and low-income youth obese or overweight [5,6,7,8] Despite these well-documented disparities, we have limited evidence on the extent to which these gaps are explained by individual characteristics, behaviors, and family resources, or differences in the environments in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools
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