Physical activity and childhood obesity

ABSTRACT

More than one-third of American children and teenagers are considered overweight or obese. Unfortunately, obesity is often a persistent and dangerous health condition that is costly to manage. It is one of the leading causes of preventable death and combating the condition has become a national priority. To this end the two most common recommendations are: eat a healthier diet and increase physical activity. Using data from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adult files, this study examines the relationship between physical activity and the persistence of childhood obesity. More specifically, Cox-proportional hazard techniques are used to quantify the impact a child’s physical activity has on the likelihood that they exit an overweight or obese state. Results indicate that being physically active reduces the probability that an overweight or obese child remains overweight or obese. Strikingly, there is not a significant difference between children who are active daily and those who are active a few times per week, suggesting that being active may be more important than the frequency of activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood obesity
• physical activity
• child health
• BMI

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I10
• I12
• I19

Acknowledgement

We thank Nicole M. Coomer and Carlos Liard-Muriente for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Full results are available from the author on request.

² The Bonferroni adjustment is used to protect against type-1 errors when simultaneous statistical tests are performed. The significance level is defined as , where there are covariates in the model (Weisstein). Thus, the statistical significance of each covariate–time interaction term is determined based on

³ Full results are available from the author on request.