Adolescent obesity and family environment in China

ABSTRACT

Numerous factors related to family environment contribute to adolescent obesity around the globe. Using the CHNS data, we estimate the total contribution of family environmental factors in explaining adolescent BMI in China. Our main finding is that 63.8% of adolescent weight variation can be attributed to family environment, and parents’ BMIs constitute a major component. Thus, policies aimed at containing adolescent obesity in China should give priorities to the family environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Obesity
• adolescent
• family environment
• parental BMI

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The assumption may fail if individual-specific factors, e.g. food choices at school, are very similar among adolescents from the same family. However, if $f_i$ is viewed more broadly to include all factors that are identical among individuals in the same family, among which family environment is a key component, this assumption would hold by definition. As a result, the measure in Equation (4) sets the upper bound of the contribution of family environmental factors in explaining adolescent BMI variation.

² An alternative modelling approach is to treat $f_i$ as fixed effect, i.e. include household dummies in the model estimation. However, this approach not only consumes a large number of degrees of freedom but also makes it impossible to disentangle the contribution of each family-specific factor in explaining adolescent BMI variation as we shall discuss below.

³ Due to the correlation among some of the family environmental factors, the total contribution of these factors is not equal to the sum of contribution of each factor, yet the difference is rather small.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71873051,72003074]; Philosophy and Social Sciences Project of Ministry of Education [18YJA790033].