Adolescent Overweight and Obesity: Links to Food Insecurity and Individual, Maternal, and Family Stressors

Chemical and non-chemical stressors affecting childhood obesity: a systematic scoping review

“…58 Other parental stressors that influence BMI levels in children include violence, serious life events, food or housing insecurity, maternal depression or substance abuse, and paternal incarceration. [59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67] For many studies, SES was a controlled variable in order to determine associations with other psychosocial stressors, but an article by Garasky et al 68 found that financial strain was positively associated with children being overweight or obese.…”

“…Similar associations were found in other studies examining children with depression, anxiety, stress, unhealthy peer relationships alone or in combination. 65,[70][71][72][73] Prenatal Exposure Research evaluating childhood obesity also examines how the child responds to shared environmental stressors between mother and child. Parental obesity is associated with infant and early childhood weight gain.…”

Economic Stressors and Childhood Obesity: Differences by Child Age and Gender

“…Lower income children are at an elevated risk of exposure to varied forms of these stressors (Gershoff et al, 2007;Pearlin et al, 2005;Wickrama et al, 2007) and may have more severe health consequences stemming from stress due to their greater exposure and vulnerability (Sampson et al, 1997;Spencer, 2001). Recently, scholars have shown an association between household-and individual-level indicators of stress and childhood obesity Gundersen et al, 2008;Lohman et al, 2009). …”

“…This result held for younger children, but the effect was statistically insignificant for older children. Lohman et al (2009) found using data from the Three-City Study that higher levels of individual stress experienced by a child between the ages of 10 and 15 were statistically significantly associated with higher probabilities of childhood obesity. In contrast to Gundersen et al (2008), they found that food insecure children with higher levels of maternal stress had higher probabilities of childhood obesity in comparison to food secure children.…”

“…While stress can be managed successfully by many individuals and families, in some cases stress can become severe enough to lead to serious health consequences. A vast literature has demonstrated the effects of stress on numerous health outcomes for children and adults (e.g., Dearing et al, 2006;Evans & English, 2002;Gee & Walsemann, 2009;Kort-Butler, 2009;Schilling et al, 2008), including childhood obesity (Eisenmann, 2006;Garasky et al, 2009;Gundersen et al, 2008;Lohman et al, 2009).…”