Overweight and School: Are There Any Perceived Achievement Consequences of Overweight Among American Youth?

Jason Bornhop,Cody Ding

doi:10.3844/jssp.2005.118.125

Abstract

In an effort to address the issue of overweight among youth, there is a growing body of research concerning the procurement food, the consequences of ingesting it and knowledge of the cultural cuisine rules (such as American cuisine may include hot dogs, hamburgers, fries and apple pie). However, there are few studies that examine the relationships between overweight and academic performance among adolescents. Based on the data collected by the World Health Organization in 1998, this study analyzed the relationships between overweight and student perceived academic performance for 15,686 children who were 10 to 15 years old. The results indicated that reported overweight was not statistically significantly related to perceived academic performance for these adolescents, while controlling for parental education level, gender, age, ethnicity, body image and other school-related variables. However, adolescents who were overweight were more likely to report that students were less friendly than those who were not overweight.

Highlights

Since the 1960s the National Center for Health and Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown a consistent increase in obesity among all age groups of children and adolescents, both males and females[1]
Childhood obesity has been shown to increase the risk of non-insulin-dependent diabetes[7,8] and overweight and obesity in adolescence greatly increase the risk of overweight and obesity in adulthood[9,10,11]
In a study done by Mosuwan, Lebel, Puetpaiboon and Junjana on a group of Thai school children using the First National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES-I) from the Centers for Disease Control, the results indicated that, in spite of the cultural differences, there was no significant correlation between grade point average (GPA) and body-mass index (BMI) for grades 3–6[23]

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1960s the National Center for Health and Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown a consistent increase in obesity among all age groups of children and adolescents, both males and females[1]. There are few empirical studies that examine the association between perceived academic performance and overweight during adolescence using nationally representative data. We hypothesize that students who are overweight (as determined by BMI percentiles for females and males of each grade level) are more likely to report lower perceived school performance than their counterparts after controlling for some major confounding factors.

Results

Conclusion