Relationship between Smoking and Obesity: A Cross-Sectional Study of 499,504 Middle-Aged Adults in the UK General Population

Shadrach Dare, Daniel F Mackay and Jill P Pell

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 4, 1-12

Abstract: Background: There is a general perception that smoking protects against weight gain and this may influence commencement and continuation of smoking, especially among young women. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted using baseline data from UK Biobank. Logistic regression analyses were used to explore the association between smoking and obesity; defined as body mass index (BMI) >30kg/m2. Smoking was examined in terms of smoking status, amount smoked, duration of smoking and time since quitting and we adjusted for the potential confounding effects of age, sex, socioeconomic deprivation, physical activity, alcohol consumption, hypertension and diabetes. Results: The study comprised 499,504 adults aged 31 to 69 years. Overall, current smokers were less likely to be obese than never smokers (adjusted OR 0.83 95% CI 0.81-0.86). However, there was no significant association in the youngest sub-group (≤40 years). Former smokers were more likely to be obese than both current smokers (adjusted OR 1.33 95% CI 1.30-1.37) and never smokers (adjusted OR 1.14 95% CI 1.12-1.15). Among smokers, the risk of obesity increased with the amount smoked and former heavy smokers were more likely to be obese than former light smokers (adjusted OR 1.60, 95% 1.56-1.64, p

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123579 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 23579&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0123579

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0123579

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().