Being Called Fat Increases Obesity Risk in Girls

Young girls, who are called fat by family and peers, have higher risk of developing obesity, a new study has found.

The study, conducted by researchers at University of California Los Angeles, found that girls who were called fat at age 10 years had a higher risk of being obese at age 19. The research was based on data from 1,213 African-American girls and 1,166 white girls living in Northern California.

Around 58 percent of the girls in the study had been called fat at age 10. Researchers measured height and weight of all the participants at the start of the study and again after nine years.

Researchers found that girls labeled as fat were around 1.66 times more likely to be obese as young adults when compared to other girls. Also, as the number of people who called a girl fat increased, so did her risk of becoming obese.

"Simply being labeled as too fat has a measurable effect almost a decade later. We nearly fell off our chairs when we discovered this," said A. Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor of psychology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and the study's senior author, according to a news release. "Even after we statistically removed the effects of their actual weight, their income, their race and when they reached puberty, the effect remained.

"That means it's not just that heavier girls are called too fat and are still heavy years later; being labeled as too fat is creating an additional likelihood of being obese," Tomiyama said in a news release.

Previous research has shown that girls as young as age 3 to 6 years worry about their weight. Also, girls who are conscious about their body image tend to develop anorexia nervosa or bulimia as they grow older. Also, overweight girls with body satisfaction have lower risk of suffering from eating disorders.

Encouraging children to eat healthy rather than berating them about their weight could actually help reduce health risks associated with poor eating habits.

Tomiyama and colleagues also had found in 2007 that there is no connection between weight loss and health improvements related to hypernetion or diabetes.

"Everyone assumes that the more weight you lose, the healthier you are, but the lowest rates of mortality are actually in people who are overweight," she said in a news release. "At a body mass index of 30, which is labeled obese, there is no increased risk of mortality. This has now been shown over and over again. The highest rate of mortality is in the underweight people."

The study is published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.