Obese Girls, Short Boys Earn Less, Study Finds

Obese teen-age girls and short teen-age boys make less money when they become young adults than others their age, a study of thousands of British youths found.

The study doesn’t indicate whether the culprit is discrimination or some internal factor such as low self-esteem, but it suggests that appearance can have a big effect on teen-agers’ transition from school to work, the researchers said in the July issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

They said research indicates that the same problems exist in the United States.

“The effects are very important just as people enter the labor market,” said co-author David G. Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. “It looks like that early stage is . . . crucial.”

Dr. James D. Sargent, lead author of the study, said obesity needs to be prevented by teaching children to eat properly. But he said he is also concerned that women are starving themselves or purging to achieve the ideal of thinness prized in British and U.S. society.

Sargent is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.

The study looked at 12,537 people in England, Scotland and Wales, where all children born between March 3 and 9, 1958, were enrolled in a national child development study and have been tracked ever since.

The study found that girls in the heaviest 10% of their age group at age 16 earned 7.4% less than their non-obese peers by the time they reached 23; and those in the heaviest 1% earned 11.4% less at age 23.

For boys, obesity did not appear to affect earnings, but height did. For every four inches less height at age 16, boys earned 2% less at age 23, the researchers found.

Previous studies, including a recent survey of more than 10,000 Americans ages 16 to 24, found that overweight people, especially women, are far less likely to get married or make a comfortable living when they get older.

Dr. William H. Dietz, who led that study, said the new work “provides once again pretty compelling evidence that obesity is a major social handicap as well as physical handicap.”

Dietz, director of clinical nutrition at New England Medical Center in Boston, said his study also found a correlation between lower male height and lower earnings.