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The Negative Association of Obesity with Subjective Well-Being: Is it All About Health?

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Abstract

In this paper we examine whether health status and functional capacity explain the fact that obese individuals report significantly lower levels of subjective well-being. We use comprehensive measures of body composition such as waist circumference, body fat percentage, and lean body mass along with body mass index. All these are measured by health professionals in a population-based sample. When controlling for health and functional status, we find very limited evidence for any independent influence of obesity on subjective well-being. This implies that the adverse effects of obesity on health and functioning are the primary explanation for the observed negative relationship between obesity and subjective well-being.

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Notes

  1. Clark and Etilé (2009) observe that the negative well-being impact of individual’s own BMI is lower when the individual’s partner is heavier. This pattern is consistent with social contagion effects in weight.

  2. Body mass index is calculated as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared.

  3. Our data contain older persons than the US data sets such as National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) or National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (see Burkhauser and Cawley 2008) that have been used in the literature on obesity.

  4. SWB is a term that includes several different components, and these components are somewhat independent (e.g. Diener et al. 1999; Dolan et al. 2011; Tinkler and Hicks 2011). The Health 2000 Survey contains only one measure of SWB that we use in this paper. Thus, we use a single-item measure of SWB. There are also multi-item scales of SWB. The most commonly used of these are the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scales (Watson et al. 1988) and the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener et al. 1985).

  5. SWB is likely to be relatively stable over short periods of time, in a general population sample like ours.

  6. Lean body mass consists of muscles and bones.

  7. Linna et al. (2013) find an inverse U-shaped relationship between SWB and BMI for a sample of young Finnish men. They also report that there is no overall association between BMI and SWB in women.

  8. The same pattern prevails for men with the use of body fat percentage (Table 4, Column 3).

  9. Katsaiti (2012, p. 4109) points out that it is important to control for income, because studies have shown that height is not connected to subjective well-being after controlling for income level.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to anonymous referees for valuable comments that have greatly improved the paper. Paul A. Dillingham has kindly checked the English language.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Labour Institute for Economic Research, Pitkänsillanranta 3A, 00530, Helsinki, Finland

    Petri Böckerman

  2. Åland University of Applied Sciences, Mariehamn, Finland

    Edvard Johansson

  3. Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, National Institute for Health and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland

    Samuli I. Saarni & Suoma E. Saarni

  4. Department of Psychiatry, Helsinki University Central Hospital and University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Samuli I. Saarni

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  1. Petri Böckerman
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  2. Edvard Johansson
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  3. Samuli I. Saarni
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  4. Suoma E. Saarni
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Correspondence to Petri Böckerman.

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Böckerman, P., Johansson, E., Saarni, S.I. et al. The Negative Association of Obesity with Subjective Well-Being: Is it All About Health?. J Happiness Stud 15, 857–867 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-013-9453-8

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