EFFECTS OF OBESITY

The effects obesity has on health status in the U.S.



Abstract

Obesity is a rapidly growing public health issue. This paper investigates obesity's relationship to individuals' wealth by analyzing data from a large U.S. longitudinal socio-economic survey. The results show a large negative association between BMI and White female's net worth, a smaller negative association for Black women and White males and no relationship for Black males. Weight changes and dieting also appear associated with wealth changes. Individuals who lose small amounts of weight experience little change in net worth, but those who lose large amounts of weight have a dramatically improved financial position, with Whites showing larger changes than Blacks.

The Effects Obesity Has On Health Status In the U.S.

Introduction

Statement of the problem

Obesity is a rapidly growing public health problem throughout the world including the United States. Since the early 1960s, Black females experienced the most startling weight gains, with obesity rates jumping from one-quarter to one-half of all Black women. Black males, White males and White females all started with much lower obesity rates but by the year 2000 they, too, were catching up, with obesity rates for all three groups more than doubling during the time-span. This development sparked many investigations into both why individuals are gaining weight and what affects these weight increases are having on individuals. Zagorsky (2004) explored the relationship between obesity and wealth in the United States, and this paper expands upon that research by exploring how obesity and wealth are related based on sex and ethnicity. The paper finds a large negative relationship between BMI and White female net worth, a smaller negative relationship for Black women and White males and no relationship for Black males. While these relationships cannot be proven as causal, they suggest that White women pay the heaviest financial penalty for being overweight, while Black males experience no penalty at all.

Survey of the literature

There are relatively few national data sets that include both health and wealth information. One exception is the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), a nationally representative panel survey of U.S. youth. The NLSY79 questioned the same group of people, born between 1957 and 1964, 19 times from its inception to present in order to provide an in-depth view of socio-economic development. While the NLSY79 began in 1979, this study uses only 12 waves of data, beginning in 1985, the first survey that included wealth questions, until 2000, the latest publicly available year of wealth data (Zagorsky, 1997).

Beyond the survey's longitudinal aspects the NLSY79 also over-sampled poor individuals, Blacks and Hispanics to ensure more accurate results for these groups. Due to space considerations, Hispanic, Asian and Native American respondents were all dropped from this research. In almost every instance when Hispanics were added back in, their results fall midway between the White and Black values. Including Asians and Native Americans in the White category resulted in no significant changes because there are so few of these respondents in the NLSY79 respondent ...