Active School Transport, Child Obesity, and Blind Spots in the Child Health Inequalities Literature

• In Event: 322 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Obesity

Abstract

As rates of active transport among school-age children (AST) have decreased and rates of child obesity increased, it has been proposed that increasing AST would help reduce child obesity and improve child health. To this effect, behavioral/educational/environmental changes have been proposed. However, studies examining the relationship between AST and child obesity have yielded mixed, even counterintuitive, results. Using AST data obtained from public elementary schools in California and child health data from the California Physical Fitness Test, we examined the association between AST and child obesity and attempted to disambiguate this relationship introducing poverty as a variable. Our most salient finding was that greater AST correlated with higher rates of child obesity. Yet more revealing was that greater AST correlated with higher rates of child poverty, which in turn correlated with substantially worse child health and obesity, suggesting that child poverty may explain the counterintuitive relationship between AST and child obesity that has puzzled other investigators. Our data also provide support for the existence of recurring blind spots in the health inequalities literature that often acknowledges that poverty begets poor health, yet rarely calls for eliminating poverty as the means to improve health and eliminate inequalities, even as the social determinants of health such as poverty have become legitimate objects of scientific inquiry. We propose that however positive behavioral or environmental changes may be for the health of the poor, the only effective way to improve child health and reduce child obesity is by eliminating or dramatically reducing child poverty.

Authors

• Claudia N. Chaufan, University of California-San Francisco

• Jarmin Yeh, University of California-San Francisco