Quantifying Socioeconomic Inequality in Childhood Obesity

We use longitudinal data on 11,000 UK-born children to examine the relationship between parental weight and income and children’s overweight across childhood. We find that children are three times as likely to be overweight or obese at 14 if they have an obese parent. Irrespective of their parents’ weight, children in the poorest 20% of families are twice as likely to be overweight or obese. These relationships persist through childhood, strengthen over time, and are impervious to observed behavioural differences between groups. This suggests that differences in shared social and economic circumstances across childhood lead to the emergence of stark inequality in childhood obesity across the income distribution by age 14