We all know that obesity is a precursor to some health problems. I ran across a study today in which the author uses longitudinal data (in other words, data that track the same kids over time) to show that obesity affects the likelihood of going to college ... but only for girls. Here's a snippet of the abstract:
"Obese girls were less likely to enter college after high school than were their nonobese peers, especially when they attended schools in which obesity was relatively uncommon. Additional analyses revealed that increasing rates of internalizing symptoms, self-medication, and academic disengagement explained about one-third of the obese girls’ lower odds of college enrollment. Obese boys, on the other hand, did not differ from their peers—no matter what their school context—in college enrollment."
(Crosnoe 2007, "Gender, Obesity, and Education." Link to full article available here: http://www.asanet.org/galleries/defa...SOEFeature.pdf.)
Kim