‘Fat black sheep’: Educational penalties of childhood obesity in an emerging country

Pierre Levasseur ()

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Objective: This article explores the relationship between childhood obesity and educational outcomes in Mexico, a country where excess weight is predominant. Design: Using complementary multivariate estimators, we empirically investigate the association between childhood excess weight, measured in 2002, and schooling attainment measured 10 years later. Non-linear specifications are tested, and heterogeneous effects according to gender, living area and economic backgrounds are investigated. Setting: To fill the literature gap, this study focuses on the understudied context of emerging countries such as Mexico. Participants: Panel data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (2002–2012) are used. We restricted the sample to adolescent individuals who had between 9 and 15 years old in 2002 (attended primary or secondary school in 2002). The survey provides an accurate follow-up information on weight, height and waist circumference for each individual. Results: Controlling for a comprehensive set of covariates, we find that the relationship is non-linear in Mexico. While weight-based childhood obesity and abdominal adiposity are significantly associated with lower school attainment, at least in urban settings, no schooling gap is found between overweight students and their normal-weight counterparts. Along with rural–urban heterogeneity, obesity-based educational penalties appear to be stronger for girls and students from privileged economic backgrounds. Conclusions: These results emphasise the co-occurrence of anti-fat and pro-fat social norms in Mexican schools: while anti-fat norms may particularly concern female, richer and urban students, pro-fat norms might persist among male, poorer and rural students. These findings have important implications for public policy, namely about awareness anti-obesity programmes.

Keywords: Mexico; Childhood obesity; Central adiposity; Educational outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-02935999v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Public Health Nutrition, 2020, pp.1-15. ⟨10.1017/S1368980020002906⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-02935999v1/document (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:hal:journl:hal-02935999

DOI: 10.1017/S1368980020002906

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().