Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 30, 1993 TAG: 9309300145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The consequences are particularly dire for women, researchers report in today's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine: Overweight women complete about half a year less school, are 20 percent less likely to get married and earn $6,710 less per year than their slimmer counterparts.
Obese women also have rates of household poverty 10 percent higher than those of women who are not overweight, the study said.
The researchers found that overweight men were 11 percent less likely to be married than thinner men but suffer few adverse economic consequences than overweight women.
The study identified 10,039 young people who were between the ages of 16 to 24 in 1981 and followed them over seven years. In 1981, 370 of those subjects were overweight.
The researchers, from Harvard University and the New England Medical Center, defined overweight as having a body weight greater than 95 percent of youth of the same age, sex and height.
The average overweight woman in the study was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 200 pounds; the average overweight man was 5 feet 9 inches and weighed 225.
For purposes of comparison, the study also tracked other young adults with chronic conditions other than obesity, including asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and various birth defects. In contrast to the overweight group, those adolescents did not differ socially or economically from people who were not overweight during the survey period.
Co-author Steven L. Gortmaker of the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that the consequences described in the study could be a result of bias. "There's real evidence that there's a fair amount of discrimination against people who are overweight," Gortmaker said. The article concluded that "our data suggest that the extension of [the Americans with Disabilities Act] to include overweight persons should be considered."
Being overweight is not necessarily recognized as a physical impairment under the act, said Peggy Mastroianni, director of the ADA policy division of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
If the condition is within a "normal range," weight is simply regarded as a physical characteristic like eye color, left-handedness or muscle tone.
Still, "It's a case-by-case situation," Mastroianni said: Obesity that is out of the normal range and caused by a physical disorder might be considered an impairment, opening the door for lawsuits against facilities and employers who discriminate.
Although obesity and low socioeconomic status have been linked, it is not clear which causes which, according to an editorial in the journal by Albert J. Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania and Thorkild I.A. Sorensen of Copenhagen Health Services in Denmark.
"There are at least three possibilities: obesity influences socioeconomic status, socioeconomic status influences obesity, or a common factor or factors influence both obesity and socioeconomic status," they wrote. But there is no definitive evidence for any of the three.
The Boston researchers, however, concluded that obesity is one of the factors that determines socioeconomic status in the United States, at least for women.
The study used statistical methods to adjust for some of the other factors that might have contributed to the socioeconomic outcomes of the survey subjects, including chronic medical conditions that might interfere with their ability to work and differences in the subjects' socioeconomic status at the onset of the study.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.