British Men Research Articles

Psychiatry, Hate Training, and the Second World War

During the Second World War, the role of psychiatrists in military training was crucial. The part played by psychiatrists in training young men for combat was of intense interest to the family and friends of service personnel, as well as to men preparing for combat. Fearing that British men would be unable to cope with the rigors of the modern battlefield and heeding the advice of behaviorist psychologists, the military established battle schools. These “schools” or training camps would focus on “battle inoculation” and “hate training.” The first battle school was established by the British army in early 1942, and a psychiatrist was appointed to it. The school had two aims: first, to establish a new battle drill to replace older methods of training that had proven unworkable; second, to “condition students to the noise and fog of war” by using live ammunition and high explosives. However, this “hate training” came under sustained attack by psychiatrists and the general public. This article uses the lens of military training to reflect on the uses and abuses of psychiatry in times of national emergency.

The significance of faith for Black men's educational aspirations

It is uncontested that British African Caribbean men are minimally represented in elite UK higher education institutions. Even as data demonstrates that African Caribbean males are more likely to study further education than White males and that the proportion of UK‐domiciled Black students pursuing higher education has increased since the 2003/04 academic year (ECU, 2014), the representation of Black students throughout the Russell Group remains low. Less than 3% of the entire Russell Group's student population comprised British African Caribbean students in 2011/12 and 2012/2013 (ECU, 2013, p. 203; ECU, 2014, p. 358). However, according to the 2011 Census, ‘Black’ people represent 5.5% (3.1 million) of the total UK population (ONS, 2015). For the few Black men who are successful in attaining acceptance at these exclusive universities, to what assets or capitals do these young men attribute their ability to get to and successful graduate from these institutions? Interviews with 15 Black male students who attended Russell Group universities in England and Wales were analysed and several ‘capitals’ or resources were identified as beneficial to their ability to succeed. Drawing on Bourdieu's work on cultural and social capital, this paper advances the concept of ‘faith capital’ as a unique recognised asset that six of the participants described and reflected upon as being influential on their academic trajectories. Based on findings from the ESRC‐funded research Exploring the narratives of the few: British African Caribbean male graduates of elite universities in England and Wales, this paper discusses these six participants’ accounts of their higher education journeys in relation to how they identified faith as a resource that was influential to their academic success.

Editor's Choice – Inequalities in Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Screening in England: Effects of Social Deprivation and Ethnicity

Population screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) in men is currently ongoing in several countries. The aim was to examine the effects of deprivation and ethnicity on uptake of screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and prevalence of AAA. This was a review of outcomes from a population screening programme using data collected contemporaneously on a bespoke national database. Men aged 65 in two annual cohorts (2013/14 and 2014/15) were invited for AAA screening. Attendance and prevalence of AAA (aortic diameter >2.9cm) were recorded. Results were compared according to measures of social deprivation and recorded ethnicity. Some 593,032 men were invited and 461,898 attended for ultrasound screening; uptake 77.9%. Uptake was related to social deprivation: 65.1% in the most deprived decile, 84.1% in the least deprived: OR for least deprived 2.84, 95% CI 2.76-2.92, p<.0001. Men in deprived areas were more likely to actively decline screening: 6% versus 3.8% in the least deprived decile. AAA were twice as common in the most deprived compared with the least deprived decile: OR 2.1, 95% CI 1.77-2.27, p<.0001. AAA were more common in white British men than in black (OR 0.46, 95% CI 0.31-0.71) or Asian (OR 0.18, 95% CI 0.13-0.26) men. There was considerable local variation in all findings. Social deprivation affects uptake of AAA screening in 65 year old men. Local factors are the most important determinants of uptake, so solutions to improve uptake must be designed at local, not national level.

Halil Kut – ‘the last Ottoman Pasha’

ABSTRACTThe siege of British Indian forces by the Ottoman Army at Kut-al-Amara ın Iraq during the First World War, which ended on 29 April 1916 with the surrender of the garrison under the command of Major General Sir Charles Townshend, was an important mılıtary defeat for Great Britain. The article provides supplementary information on aspects of the 147 day long siege and surrender, based mainly on the memoirs of the Turkish General H. K. Pasha, whose forces took well over 10,000 British Indian officers and men into custody at Kut-al-Amara.

Explaining young British Muslim men’s involvement in heroin and crack

Recent years have seen an upsurge in the numbers of British Muslim men, particularly young British Muslim men aged from 18–35 involved in the sale of drugs. However, despite this alleged increase, very little is known as to what motivates young British Muslim men to become involved with drugs. This has led some commentators to deliberate whether there are perhaps cultural or religious reasons which may motivate Muslim men to become involved with drugs. This article, which is taken from a four-year phenomenological study (2010–2014) with a social group of young British Pakistani Muslim men who traded in heroin and crack argues that the young men (also known as The Boys) were not motivated by religious or cultural reasons but were instead motivated by a number of underlying issues. Factors such as deprivation, a need for status, the challenge of finding suitable paid employment, a reluctance to work in jobs that could affect status were all possible factors which explained why The Boys were involved in drugs.

Does Parenthood Change Attitudes to Fathering? Evidence from Australia and Britain

A wealth of research has established that the transition to parenthood can shift men’s and women’s attitudes to motherhood. We add to this knowledge base by examining how attitudes to fatherhood change across the transition to parenthood. This is important within a historical period in which definitions of what it means to be a good father are changing to emphasise hands-on involvement in childcare, yet there has been little institutional change to support this. Our empirical analyses rely on long-running, panel data from Britain and Australia, and fixed-effect panel regression models. We find that attitudes to fatherhood change significantly after the birth of a first child. For most of the measures considered, parenthood results in men’s attitudes to fatherhood becoming comparatively more egalitarian than women’s. While both Australian and British men become more enthusiastic towards being involved in the care and upbringing of their children after experiencing parenthood, Australian women become less likely to agree that fathers should do so. These findings provide a partial explanation for why couples engage in more traditional gender divisions of labour after parenthood. They suggest that men’s involvement in childcare is not only constrained at the institutional and employment levels, but also by their female partners becoming more reluctant to support an active fathering role. More broadly, our research adds to growing evidence demonstrating that first births are an important life-course marker, and parenthood has the capacity to shift how men and women perceive their familial roles and their broader roles in society.

Genetic variation within the Y chromosome is not associated with histological characteristics of the atherosclerotic carotid artery or aneurysmal wall

Background and aimsHaplogroup I, a common European paternal lineage of the Y chromosome, is associated with increased risk of coronary artery disease in British men. It is unclear whether this haplogroup or any other haplogroup on the Y chromosome is associated with histological characteristics of the diseased vessel wall in other vascular manifestations of cardiovascular diseases showing a male preponderance. MethodsWe examined Dutch men undergoing either carotid endarterectomy from the Athero-Express biobank (AE, n = 1217) or open aneurysm repair from the Aneurysm-Express biobank (AAA, n = 393). Upon resolving the Y chromosome phylogeny, each man was assigned to one of the paternal lineages based on combinations of single nucleotide polymorphisms of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome. We examined the associations between the Y chromosome and the histological characteristics of the carotid plaque and aneurysm wall, including lipid content, leukocyte infiltration and intraplaque haemorrhage, in all men. ResultsA majority of men were carriers of either haplogroup I (AE: 28% AAA: 24%) or haplogroup R (AE: 59% AAA: 61%). We found no association between Y chromosomal haplogroups and histological characteristics of plaque collected from carotid arteries or tissue specimens of aneurysms. Moreover, the distribution of frequency for all Y chromosomal haplogroups in both cohorts was similar to that of a general population of Dutch men. ConclusionsOur data show that genetic variation on the Y chromosome is not associated with histological characteristics of the plaques from carotid arteries or specimens of aneurysms in men of Dutch origin.

“I’ll explain what I can”: A conversation with Avaes Mohammad

Since the 2001 race riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham and the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, British Muslims have been subjected to increased levels of suspicion and hostility. In particular, the spotlight has shone on working-class South Asian Muslim communities in the north of England, which have been accused of “self-segregation” and constructed as alienated from and posing a threat to “Britishness”. Racial divisions and tensions have been problematically blamed on the “failure” of multiculturalism; commentators from the left and right of the political spectrum have claimed multiculturalist practice and policies have encouraged too much diversity, thereby obstructing integration, while social factors such as poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, and “white flight” have been obscured or at best downplayed.1 As news stories of young British Muslim men joining extremist organizations at home or abroad continue to circulate, the communities’ male youth remain particularly susceptible to Islamophobic stereotyping and profiling. In this interview, performance poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad discusses the ways his work engages with this fraught political context. Our conversation begins by considering his experience of growing up in a racially divided northern English town in the 1980s and 1990s, before turning to the impact of the events of 2001 on his life and art. We discuss the role art can play in politics, and the part faith can play in art, before focusing on specific representations in his plays of young British Muslims held at Guantánamo Bay, divided working-class communities in the north of England, and young men — both Muslim and white — drawn to different kinds of extremism. Finally, we explore the racial and social exclusions of the creative arts, and the reception of Mohammad’s work.

Choosing to Remain Childless? A Comparative Study of Fertility Intentions Among Women and Men in Italy and Britain

Pathways to childlessness may differ not only between individuals but also at the population level. This paper investigates differences in childlessness by comparing two countries—Britain and Italy—where levels of childlessness are high in comparison with many other European countries, but which have distinct fertility trajectories and family regimes. Using data from two large, representative national samples of women and men of reproductive age in a co-residential partnership, it presents a rich analysis of the characteristics associated with intended childlessness, net of the aspects associated with being childless at interview. Although childlessness intentions are generally comparable between men and women of the same age, results show a link between socio-economic disadvantage and childlessness for British men as well as the importance of men’s employment for childbearing decisions in Italy. These findings support the view that pathways into childlessness are gendered and highlight the importance of partnership context in the understanding of fertility intentions. Then, the level of childlessness at interview is comparable across the two countries. However, a higher proportion of respondents in Italy is only provisionally childless, whereas a larger proportion of British respondents intends to remain childless. Framing these differences in fertility intentions within the wider context of family and fertility regimes allows insight into the extent to which observed levels of lifetime childlessness at the population level might result from a specific combination of intended childlessness, postponed decisions leading to involuntary childlessness, or constraints affecting abilities to achieve intentions at the individual level.

Coping with perceived ethnic prejudice on the gay scene

ABSTRACTThere has been only cursory research into the sociological and psychological aspects of ethnic/racial discrimination among ethnic minority gay and bisexual men, and none that focuses specifically upon British ethnic minority gay men. This article focuses on perceptions of intergroup relations on the gay scene among young British South Asian gay men and the effects of perceived prejudice for their identities. Twelve young British South Asian gay men were interviewed about their experiences. The qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis, which yielded the following themes: (a) ethnic otherization on the gay scene, (b) mechanisms of rejection on the gay scene, and (c) nowhere to turn: double rejection and identity threat. The data indicate that young British South Asian gay men may face multiple layers of rejection—racism and homophobia from the general population, homophobia from the ethnoreligious community, and racism from White British gay men. This can deprive young British South Asian gay men of the only remaining source of social support that they perceive—namely the sexual ingroup—inducing negative social and psychological outcomes for identity processes.

Masculinity, Age and Life Cycle in the Age of Reform

The 1867 Reform Act created a polity in which, for 50 years, age and householding status were frequently more important than class in determining British men's right to vote. In the debates leading up to the act, both age and householder status were deployed to manage fears of greater democratisation. This essay traces some of the associative connections parliamentarians made between the sexual and family status of potential voters; their relationship to their fathers or sons; the kinds of houses in which they dwelt; and their personal decisions to delay or undertake marriage. The claim that the new male voter was distinguished for his ‘independence’ has been much discussed. However, it is suggested here that it was equally the figure of the settled citizen which emerged as significant during parliamentary debate. This was a category which could be interlaced with a stream of connected ideas concerning attachment to the ‘hearth’, the community, and to Anglo‐Saxon heritage itself. During the age of reform, calls to raise the age of suffrage frequently surfaced. This contributed to a climate of opinion which legitimised arguments denigrating the political abilities of the young and which helped to make possible age‐related political structures. Analysed alongside debates over the merits of an education clause in 1866 and the amendment to enfranchise lodgers the following year, the essay considers how class‐specific distinctions of age and life cycle helped to uphold an enduring model of hegemonic masculinity, centring on the mature, householding male.

“I’d rather my brother was a bomber than a homo”: British Muslim masculinities and homonationalism in Sally El Hosaini’sMy Brother the Devil

Images of young British Muslim men engaging in terrorist activity or gang warfare proliferate in contemporary media. Such distortions frame Muslim males as a homogeneous and threatening presence within Britain; men who, despite living in the UK, are prone to a pathological form of masculinity supposedly inculcated by their religio-cultural background. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir K. Puar develops the framework of “homonationalism” to examine the relationship between hostilities towards Muslims and growing acceptance of LGBT subjectivities in Euro-America. Puar argues that popular discourses stereotype diverse ethno-cultural groups under a distinct racialized, religiously-defined “Muslim” grouping. These Muslim “others”, recognized through racial and sartorial profiling, are assigned viewpoints that place them in opposition to the purportedly “enlightened” West. Puar shows how this dualism has been continually reproduced in cultural production, propagating the view that to be Muslim is to be axiomatically homophobic. This article assesses the extent to which homonationalism is replicated in the British film My Brother the Devil (dir. Sally El Hosaini, 2012). Set on a housing estate in Hackney, it depicts two London-born brothers of Egyptian heritage, Rash and Mo, as elder brother Rash leaves his “gangster” lifestyle after falling in love with photographer Sayid. My Brother the Devil invokes moral panics about young British Muslim men, as well as the increased visibility of homosexuality in recent UK media and cultural output, to probe connections between masculinity, sexuality, race, and class. However, this article posits that My Brother the Devil inadvertently upholds homonationalist binaries. By analysing the film, this paper contends that what Puar terms a “Muslim or gay binary” should be considered in a British context to address how certain “liberal” Muslim subjectivities are incorporated within imaginings of Britishness, at the exclusion of Muslim subjectivities that do not fit these prescriptions.

Ethnic Variations in Liver- and Alcohol-Related Disease Hospitalisations and Mortality: The Scottish Health and Ethnicity Linkage Study.

Aims Preventing alcohol-related harms, including those causing liver disease, is a public health priority in the UK, especially in Scotland, but the effects of ethnicity are not known. We assessed liver- and alcohol-related events (hospitalisations and deaths) in Scotland using self-reported measures of ethnicity. Methods Linking Scottish NHS hospital admissions and mortality to the Scottish Census 2001, we explored ethnic differences in hospitalisations and mortality (2001–2010) of all liver diseases, alcoholic liver disease (ALD) and specific alcohol-related diseases (ARD). Risk ratios (RR) were calculated using Poisson regression with robust variance, by sex, adjusted for age, country of birth and the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) presented below. The White Scottish population was the standard reference population with 95% confidence intervals (CI) calculated to enable comparison (multiplied by 100 for results). Results For all liver diseases, Chinese had around 50% higher risks for men (RR 162; 95% CI 127–207) and women (141; 109–184), as did Other South Asian men (144; 104–201) and Pakistani women (140; 116–168). Lower risks for all liver diseases occurred in African origin men (42; 24–74), other White British men (72; 63–82) and women (80; 70–90) and other White women (80; 67–94). For ALD, White Irish had a 75% higher risk for men (175; 107–287). Other White British men had about a third lower risk of ALD (63; 50–78), as did Pakistani men (65; 42–99). For ARD, almost 2-fold higher risks existed for White Irish men (182; 161–206) and Any Mixed Background women (199; 152–261). Lower risks of ARD existed in Pakistani men (67; 55–80) and women (48; 33–70), and Chinese men (55; 41–73) and women (54; 32–90). Conclusions Substantial variations by ethnicity exist for both alcohol-related and liver disease hospitalisations and deaths in Scotland: these exist in subgroups of both White and non-White populations and practical actions are required to ameliorate these differences.

Sexual Activity in British Men’s Prisons: A Culture of Denial

Theorized through Stanley Cohen’s sociology of denial and informed by testimonies from formerly imprisoned men, this article argues that a culture of denial limits the ability and willingness of prison authorities and prison staff to recognize, acknowledge and respond appropriately to the realities of sexual activity in British prisons. It has three objectives: to detail experiences of consensual and coercive sex; to elucidate the collective and collaborative cultural habit of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ by which what is known becomes not known and what is concealed remains hidden; and to show how this strategy leaves unprotected those who choose to engage in, or are coerced into, sexual activity.

Women's Suffrage and Confederation

Women's Suffrage and Confederation Heidi Macdonald (bio) WOMEN'S RIGHTS' CAMPAIGNS IN ATLANTIC CANADA were already underway by the time of Confederation. Belying some earlier historians' conclusions to the contrary, the three Maritime provinces and Newfoundland all had steady campaigns for women's rights, beginning in the mid-19th century with dower laws and married women's property acts and culminating with suffrage legislation between 1918 and 1925.1 By exploring the question of whether Atlantic Canada, like the Prairies and Quebec, had a regional suffrage movement, examining the nature of the connections between local, national, and international movements, and situating this analysis within a broader historiographical context, this article considers how and to what extent Confederation affected these suffrage campaigns. A year after marking the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we will mark the 100th anniversary of the federal enfranchisement of women in 2018. Just as an earlier generation of women historians had to remind us that the "universal suffrage" of the 19th century, which excluded women, should be defined more precisely as "universal male suffrage," so, too, in celebrating this anniversary, we must recognize that the suffrage remained a privilege that was not accorded federally or provincially to all women and men of voting age. Shifting understandings of who had a "stake in society," as Gail Campbell has explained, led to much defining and redefining of voter eligibility in the last two centuries, initially favouring rate-paying landowners and later embracing those who made other contributions.2 Arguments supporting women's suffrage invariably spoke to women's stake in society. Not surprisingly, apart from the late 18th- and early 19th-century legislation that ignored gender as a qualification and therefore allowed women who dared to vote to do so in New Brunswick until 1843, PEI until 1836, and Nova Scotia until 1851, unmarried, property-holding women were the first women to garner the vote in Atlantic Canada because of their stake in their municipalities as taxpayers and their not being politically represented by husbands.3 Similarly, the argument that middle-class [End Page 163] women's contributions were equivalent to if not greater than the contributions of working-class and immigrant men was used to rationalize more women voters' eligibility. As Liberal New Brunswick MLA William Roberts argued in the legislature in 1917: "A male foreigner, ignorant of our language, laws, customs, and national life, gets the vote after three years' residence because he is a 'man.' Would hon. Gentlemen class their mothers, wives and sisters with such men as these? Would they say that college graduates, school teachers, nurses, business and professional women were more ignorant than foreigners?"4 The 1918 federal Act to Confer the Electoral Franchise Upon Women stated: "Women who are British subjects, 21 years of age, and otherwise meet the qualifications entitling a man to vote, are entitled to vote in a Dominion election." 5 Because provincial, racial and other qualifications were carried into the federal legislation, British Columbian women and men of Japanese, Chinese, and Hindu heritage, and Saskatchewan women and men of Chinese ethnicity could not vote until 1948, while First Nations women and men living on-reserve in any province were not eligible to vote until 1960.6 And when the Dominion of Newfoundland enacted suffrage in 1925, women voters had to be 25 or older, while men had to be just 21, promulgating an assumption that an older woman held a greater stake in society than a younger one perhaps because of motherhood. This essay focuses specifically on provincial (and, in the case of Newfoundland, dominion) suffrage campaigns while recognizing their contexts in a series of women's rights campaigns, including calls for improvements in married women's property laws and for women's eligibility for school trusteeships along with broader social and moral reforms ranging from the establishment of urban playgrounds, through prohibition, to training for domestic servants. While these gender and social reforms did not pave a straight road to suffrage, there is no doubt of the cumulative impact of women's rights activism and the overlap of many reforms, including, for example, prohibition and suffrage.7 The historiography on suffrage in Atlantic Canada has had two...

The Osler Library Prints Collection.

The Osler Library Prints Collection Shelley McKellar The Osler Library Prints Collection http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/oslerprints/index.php The Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University houses the personal library of well-known physician and bibliophile Sir William Osler, who bequeathed his collection of roughly eight thousand rare medical and scientific texts to his alma mater. Today, the Osler Library contains more than one hundred thousand works, making it the largest library for historical research in medicine and health in Canada. Not everyone may be able to travel to Montreal—although I strongly urge you to visit—so researchers will be pleased to learn that Osler librarians are making some of their historical material available online by digitizing their special collections, including the Osler Library Prints Collection. The Osler Library Prints Collection consists of approximately 2,500 visual documents, predominantly prints but also cartoons, drawings, posters, and some photographs, ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The majority [End Page 435] of the collection consists of portraits, mostly of British and European medical men, including recognizable prints removed from publications. Images of some Canadian physicians can be found, often captured by the Montreal-based photographers William Notman and James Inglis. (Photos of Sir William Osler and his family have also been digitized but reside in the separate online William Osler Photo Collection, which incidentally created the template for subsequent Osler Library digitization projects.) There are lots of cartoons and caricatures in this prints collection, in both English and French, including etchings by Scottish caricaturist John Kay, late-nineteenth-century color lithographs from Vanity Fair, and full-page comics by the French firm of Pellerin and Co. (renamed l'Imagerie d'Epinal). "Cartoons and Caricatures" is one of eight subcategories imposed on the collection and presented to visitors on the home page. Interested in browsing the collection by creator, scenes, or advertisements? For each of these options, there is a connecting page that offers a short paragraph that frames the subject material, followed by a table presentation of relevant collection items. For example, if you visit the advertisements category, did you know that the Homburg pharmaceutical company (and presumably others) distributed portraits of accomplished German physicians with information about various drugs on the back? The site is easy to navigate and offers good, but not overwhelming, descriptive text to support the online database of prints. The menu bar on the home page is uncluttered and neatly organizes pertinent information. The "About" menu tab describes the collection in more detail than the home page, such as offering information about the various sources that constitute this collection. I quite appreciated the separate menu tab dedicated to printing techniques that reminded me about the differences of engravings and etchings, stipple and mezzotint, as well as lithographs and photographs. Use the drop down menu "Browse Pictures" and you'll find a "Browse All Pictures" option below the site's eight suggested subcategories. This last menu tab seems redundant, as it repeats information located on the home page, but since the menu bar remains constant on every page, it serves to be useful as you click deeper into the site. So did I find what I was looking for, or better yet, some unexpected materials that I might have missed otherwise? In my opinion, the value of any online collection is linked to how robust the search engine is and to document delivery and readability. This online collection site does both well. I liked the simple search box (with advanced search option) at the top of every page. This meant that I could search the database by print number or by keyword anywhere in the record entry. Given my interest in medical technology, I did a search using the keyword "instrument." Forty-eight images appeared, in thumbnail form with brief identifier tags, allowing me a quick overview before I clicked to enlarge an image and peruse the full record. My search results included portraits, medical scenes, apparatus illustrations, caricatures and cartoons, posters and comics. I viewed a range of items with connections to instruments, including: Robert Cooper's engraved portrait of English otologist John Harrison Curtis, who invented several new...

British Anti-Suffrage and the Emancipation of Women in Iraq: The Case of Gertrude Bell

For Gertrude Bell being ‘as good as any man’ was an objective she tried to prove all her life, not only by climbing the Alps and roaming the Arabian Desert but in almost all aspects of life. This challenge remained with her till the end and may well have been one of the reasons behind her success. Bell was against female suffrage and had eagerly worked to prevent granting the vote to British women, yet she became the first British female officer and many times, exceeded the performance of her male colleagues. Bell enjoyed her role as the Oriental Secretary to Sir Percy Cox to the point of forgetting she was a woman. She insisted she was sexless and dismissed most women as uninteresting. However, her sex facilitated her mission among the Arabs who wondered what British men would be like if this was one of their women. After the vote was partially granted to British women in 1918, Bell embarked on emancipating Iraqi women. This paper highlights the contrast between Bell’s public and private personas, her anti-suffrage activities and her role in emancipating urban women in Iraq.

Characterization of the metabolically healthy phenotype in overweight and obese British men

We calculated the prevalence of the metabolically healthy but obese (MHO) phenotype in (n=9177) British men (age 48.9±7.4years) attending preventive health screening between 2000 and 2009. We examined differences in cardiorespiratory fitness (Fitness) and self-reported physical activity levels, according to whether the men were metabolically healthy (<2 components of the metabolic syndrome), and by BMI category (normal-weight, overweight, obese). Fitness was estimated from treadmill exercise as VO2peak and classified as: Low, Moderate, or High using age-specific cut-offs. We identified 21.6% of our sample as obese, of whom 83.1% were metabolically healthy. Compared with the metabolic unhealthy obese (MUO; 3.7% of sample), MHO phenotypes were fitter (effect size d=0.21) and were more physically active (d=0.31). Logistic regression showed high fitness (OR=2.40, 95% CI 1.38–4.19), and being physically active (OR=1.71, 95% CI 1.14–2.56) to be independently associated with the MHO phenotype. Our findings agree with US data suggesting that higher cardiorespiratory fitness is a characteristic of the MHO phenotype. Our finding that meeting physical activity guidelines was associated with the MHO phenotype independent of fitness is, however, novel. If confirmed, our findings indicate that public health messages that encourage active lifestyles to promote fitness should be encouraged regardless of weight status.

Work-family life courses and BMI trajectories in three British birth cohorts

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES:Combining work and family responsibilities has previously been associated with improved health in mid-life, yet little is known about how these associations change over time (both biographical and historical) and whether this extends to body mass index (BMI) trajectories for British men and women. The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between work-family life courses and BMI trajectories across adulthood (16–42 years) for men and women in three British birth cohorts.SUBJECTS/METHODS:Multiply imputed data from three nationally representative British birth cohorts were used—the MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD; 1946 birth cohort, n=3012), the National Child Development Study (NCDS; 1958 birth cohort, n=9614) and the British Cohort Study (BCS; 1970 birth cohort, n=8140). A typology of work-family life course types was developed using multi-channel sequence analysis, linking annual information on work, partnerships and parenthood from 16 to 42 years. Work-family life courses were related to BMI trajectories using multi-level growth models. Analyses adjusted for indicators of prior health, birthweight, child BMI, educational attainment and socioeconomic position across the life course, and were stratified by gender and cohort.RESULTS:Work-family life courses characterised by earlier transitions to parenthood and weaker long-term links to employment were associated with greater increases in BMI across adulthood. Some of these differences, particularly for work-family groups, which are becoming increasingly non-normative, became more pronounced across cohorts (for example, increases in BMI between 16 and 42 years in long-term homemaking women: NSHD: 4.35 kg m–2, 95% confidence interval (CI): 3.44, 5.26; NCDS: 5.53 kg m–2, 95% CI: 5.18, 5.88; BCS: 6.69 kg m–2, 95% CI: 6.36, 7.02).CONCLUSIONS:Becoming a parent earlier and weaker long-term ties to employment are associated with greater increases in BMI across adulthood in British men and women.

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

The Extremities of Racial Meaning