Original articleAdolescent Overweight and Obesity: Links to Food Insecurity and Individual, Maternal, and Family Stressors
Section snippets
Participants
Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study is a 6-year longitudinal, multimethod investigation. The Three-City Study includes, among other components, a household-based stratified random sample survey with over 2400 children and their mothers in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. A detailed explanation of the sampling design and its scientific rationale can be found in Winston et al [25]. Data from the first wave of interviews conducted in 1999 were used in
Results
Descriptive statistics (Table 1) indicate that about half of the analytic sample was overweight or obese and 8% of the adolescents were food insecure. The average numbers of individual, maternal, and family stressors were 1.44, 2.10, and 6.28, respectively.
Results of the regression models are generally robust across both CDC and IOTF cut points and, therefore, are discussed in general (Table 2). Overall, food insecurity, maternal, and family stressors were not related to the weight status of
The impact of food insecurity and maternal stressors
This study contributes to the often discussed relationship between food insecurity and childhood overweight. Consistent with some previous work (e.g., [7], [8]) there was no direct association between food insecurity and adolescent overweight. To our knowledge, this is only the second study to examine the interaction of food insecurity and stress on the probability of obesity among adolescents. Significant strengths of this study include the ability to consider a wide variety of stressors
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by the USDA, Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) grant number 2007-35215-17871. The authors wish to thank Duhita Mahatmya for her excellent assistance with the preparation of this manuscript.
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