Childhood circumstances, social mobility and the obesity transition: Evidence from South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The distribution of obesity tends to shift from rich to poor individuals as countries develop, in a process of shifting sociodemographic patterns of obesity that has been called the 'obesity transition'. This change tends to happen with economic development, but little is known about the specific mechanisms that drive the change. We propose that improvements in childhood circumstances with economic development may be one of the drivers of the obesity transition. We explore whether the social gradient in body weight differs by childhood socioeconomic status (SES), proxied by the respondent's mother having Grade 12, using South Africa's nationally representative panel National Income Dynamics Study. In support of our hypothesis, we find that the social gradient in body weight is less positive for adults who had a high childhood SES, and already appears to have reversed among high-SES women who also had a high childhood SES. Upward social mobility over an individual's life course or across a single generation is associated with higher body weight compared to a stable high SES. But a high SES sustained in childhood and adulthood - or across more than one generation - may decrease adult obesity risk, and result in a reversal of the social gradient in body weight. Random effects within-between models show that the social gradient in body weight and its interaction with childhood SES are driven more by differences in income between individuals than by short-run changes in income within individuals, again suggesting that the obesity transition is driven by long-run changes rather than by very short-run changes. Our results are broadly robust to using several alternative measures of body weight, childhood SES and adult SES. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that widespread improvements in childhood circumstances and nutrition with economic development may contribute to the shift to later stages of the obesity transition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".