Poorer children nearly three times as likely to be obese, new study finds
Saturday, December 12, 2015 - 15:00
in Health & Medicine
A new study has questioned why poorer children are at higher risk of obesity compared to their better-off peers. The link between relative poverty and childhood obesity turned out to be quite stark. At age 5, poor children were almost twice as likely to be obese compared with their better off peers. 6.6% of children from families in the poorest fifth of the sample were obese while the figure for the richest fifth is just 3.5%. By the age of 11 the gap has widened, nearly tripling to 7.9% of the poorest fifth are obese; for the best-off, the figure is 2.9%.