Influence of country of birth and ethnicity on body mass index among Canadian youth: a national survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The body mass index (BMI) of youth often changes when they immigrate to a new country as a result of the adoption of new behaviours, a process called acculturation. We investigated whether BMI differs by country of birth (Canada v. other countries) and ethnicity, both individually and together. We also examined whether time since immigration and health-related behaviour explain any observed BMI differences. METHODS: Data sources were the Canadian Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study and the Canada Census of Population. Participants were youth in grades 6-10 (weighted sample n = 19 272). A questionnaire was used to assess participants' sociodemographic characteristics, height, weight and health-related behaviour. We calculated BMIs from participants' self-reported heights and weights and used World Health Organization growth references to determine BMI percentiles. RESULTS: Based on self-reported heights and weights, BMI percentiles for foreign-born youth were lower than those of youth born in Canada (-4, 95% confidence interval [CI] -6 to -2). This difference did not decrease with time since immigration. Similarly, BMI percentiles were lower among East and Southeast Asian youth than their peers from the Canadian host culture (-4, 95% CI -6 to -2). Finally, BMI percentiles for foreign-born Arab and West Asian youth and East Indian and South Asian youth were lower than their Canadian-born peers of the same ethnicity (-14, 95% CI -22 to -7; -8, 95% CI -14 to -3). INTERPRETATION: Immigrant generation and ethnicity were related to BMI among Canadian youth, both independently and together. Some ethnic groups showed differences by country of birth, i.e., East Indian and South Asian, while others showed no such difference, i.e., East and Southeast Asian. There was no association with time since immigration. Our findings reinforce the need to investigate country of birth and ethnicity when considering the determinants of childhood BMI.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".