fast food
May 02, 2005
Some faculty and graduate students at the University of Maryland have been teaching students at Northwestern High School to investigate the causes of obesity in their community. The students are taping interviews of fellow youth and will create an audio segment for this website to publicize their research results. To give them some data to work from,
we surveyed all the students in the school's health classes. The response rate was poor, because students had to bring in parental permission slips before they could complete the survey.
Nevertheless, we received enough surveys to draw tentative statistical conclusions. Here is a suprising one. None of the 17 kids who said that they ate fast food every day are overweight (according to their self-reported combination of height and weight). However, 43% of those who said they eat "hardly any" fast food are considered clinically overweight.
What's going on? Maybe a lot of kids are mistaken or dishonest, but it's strange that the relationship between fast food and body weight would be so linear and negative. The sample is too small for serious statistical analysis, but we noticed that immigrant kids are more likely to eat fast food, yet less likely to be overweight. So maybe immigrants eat good food at home but go out a lot to McDonalds.
There are more possible explanations. For instance, the Washington Post's "Kid's Post" section reported that young people order less healthy food at restaurants like Outback Steakhouse and Red Lobster than they do at fast-food places. So maybe it's good to go to McDonalds if it keeps you from ordering the "surf and turf" at a sit-down restaurant. we don't know, but the students are busy asking research questions.
Posted by Prince Georges at May 2, 2005 01:53 AM
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