Better-educated women are a healthier weight, new research reveals
Men have higher body mass the more educated they are - except in United States
A new comparison of multi-national data, released this month, reveals that
highly educated women have a healthier average weight than less educated women,
but that the meaning of “healthier” changes according to a nation’s
relative wealth. In countries where malnutrition is prevalent, better-educated
women weigh more. But in wealthier countries — with rapidly growing rates of
obesity — better-educated women weigh less.
“As a population moves through the nutrition transition, it is the most
educated, and highest income, who are the first to exit under-nutrition. They
are also the first to adjust their diet and physical activity to avoid the
deleterious effects of being overweight,” explained John Strauss, professor of
economics at the University of Southern California.
“It appears that it is women who tend to lead this transition,” he added.
More than half of the adult population is underweight in Bangladesh, the
poorest country analyzed by Strauss and Duncan Thomas (Duke University). In
Bangladesh, average female body mass increased with every additional year of
schooling.
In contrast, only 1 percent of people in the United States are underweight.
Better-educated women in the United States, the wealthiest country in the study,
had a lower average body mass index the more education they’d received, the
researchers found.
“Obesity rates rise with economic development which is troubling given the
relationship between obesity and cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and
possibly cancer,” Strauss said. For example, the researchers show that almost
twice as many women are now overweight as are underweight in China.
Furthermore, in developing countries worldwide, women are more likely than
men to be overweight or obese. The gender gap is largest in South Africa, where
more than one-third of women are obese, compared with about 10 percent of South
African men.
However, Strauss and Thomas show that once women receive a certain amount of
schooling, average body mass index (BMI) falls and they are more likely to be at
a healthy weight.
“Behavioural changes have important impacts on health outcomes,” Strauss
said.
For example, the average BMI of a Mexican woman — where 74 percent of the
women are overweight or obese — declines for every year of schooling she
receives in excess of just five years. There is a similar sharp decline in the
average female’s BMI in South Africa after five years of education.
BMI is a widely used measure that accounts for both weight and height.
The United States was the only nation surveyed in which better-educated men
had a lower average BMI than less-educated men. In every other country, the
average male body mass increased with every additional year of schooling.
More information:
The findings appear in the latest volume of the “Handbook of Development
Economics,” edited by Strauss and T. Paul Schultz (Yale University). The new
book is the first update in more than 13 years to the “Handbook of Development
Economics,” which has counted at least six Nobel Prize laureates among its
contributors.
“Data has vastly improved since the last volume,” said Strauss, who is
also the principal investigator for the long-term Indonesia Family Life Survey,
which tracks more than 30,000 individuals.
An unmatched resource for scholars, the “Handbook of Development Economics”
summarizes and synthesizes important research about economic development,
including the role of institutions such as schools, medical facilities and fair
court systems. Nobel Prize laureate Amaryta Sen wrote the first chapter of the
first volume of the “Handbook in Development Economics” in 1988.
Topics explored in the latest volume, released in April 2008, include the
decline of agricultural employment, the effects of changing fertility through
availability of contraception or family planning programs, child labor and
political corruption.
Schultz, T.P. and John Strauss. “Handbook of Development Economics: Volume
4,” (Amsterdam: North-Holland Press, 2008).
Contact: Suzanne Wu
suzanne.wu@usc.edu
213-740-0252
University of Southern California
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