FOR RELEASE: April 1, 1997
Contact: Susan Lang
Office: (607) 255-3613
Internet: [email protected]
Compuserve: Larry Bernard 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Although high school women are more concerned about their
weight than men are about theirs, the women are more willing than men to
date an overweight person. Once married, obese husbands are less happy with
their marriages than other men, but men who have lost weight report fewer
marital problems than obese or average-weight men or men who have gained
weight during marriage. Obese wives, on the other hand, are happier with
their marriages than average-weight wives. While newly-married women gain
more weight than other wives do, or men do proportionately, few gain a lot
during their first year of marriage.
These are some of the recent findings of Jeffery Sobal, a Cornell
nutritional sociologist who studies the sociology of obesity and the
relationship between obesity and dating, marriage and marital satisfaction.
"Basically, we're finding that you are what you weigh and you weigh what
you are," said Sobal, associate professor of nutritional sciences. "In
other words, body weight is largely a reflection of one's culture,
socioeconomic and marital status, life stage and ethnicity."
Some cultures value big round bodies, though not the United States. In
this country, the higher one's socioeconomic status, the thinner a person
is likely to be. Married people weigh more than the unmarried, parents
weigh more than nonparents and whites weigh less -- and value thinness more
-- than Hispanics or African Americans, reports Sobal with Cornell
colleague Carol Devine, assistant professor of nutritional sciences. They
are authors of the chapter, "Social Aspects of Obesity: Influences,
Consequences, Assessment, and Interventions," in the new book Overweight
and Weight Management, edited by Sharron Dalton (ASPEN 1997).
"While the population of this country -- and the world for that matter --
is getting fatter, ideals about body weight increasingly emphasize
slimness. Society tends to reject obese individuals and subject them to
severe stigmatization and discrimination in many social arenas, including
education, employment, marriage, housing and health care," Sobal said.
"Such discrimination is particularly harmful because it obstructs obese
people from entering important and desirable roles in society, such as
student, employee and spouse. Such discrimination can have a major impact
on a person for their entire life."
In a study of 786 high school students, Sobal with then-Cornell
undergraduate students Vasiliki Nicolopoulos and Jennifer Lee examined how
much prejudice students felt in dating obese people. In a paper published
in the International Journal of Obesity (Vol. 19, pp. 376-381, 1995), the
authors reported that dating someone of the right weight was much more
important to high school men than to high school women.
In addition, women were more likely to consider themselves overweight and
had more stringent body weight ideals than men had about women. Women were also much more concerned about being the right weight than men were.
"Men had less tolerance for overweight partners than did women,
consistently reporting less comfort in dating overweight people," the
authors wrote.
To examine how body weight is related to marital unhappiness and problems,
Sobal and Cornell colleagues Barbara S. Rauschenback and Edward Frongillo
used data on 1,980 married individuals. The sample was from the National
Survey of Personal Health Practices and Consequences conducted by the
National Center for Health Statistics in two waves in 1979-1980.
While the authors found that body weight was not associated with most
aspects of marital quality, several relationships emerged as significant.
"Obese women were happier with their marriages than other women, whereas
obese men had more marital problems other men. Men who gained weight were
more likely to report marital problems than men who lost weight, while
women who gained weight were more likely to be happy compared with those
who lost weight," the authors reported in the Journal of Family Issues
(Vol. 16, November 1995, pp. 746-763).
"One theory about why obese women were happier with their marriages is
related to recognizing their decreased value in the marriage market in a
society that stigmatizes obesity. As a result, obese women are more likely
to be satisfied with their current marital condition compared with
opportunities for seeking a new partner. In other words, women appear to
internalize and accept the negative assessments of their obesity," the
authors said.
Obese men, on the other hand, may be more likely to have marital problems
because their wives may be pressuring them to lose weight; such pressure
may lead to hostility and conflict. Also, the authors speculate that men
are less likely to accept the negative social view about body weight than
women.
The same three researchers also analyzed data on 2,436 respondents from the
same survey to see how a change in marital status affected weight change in
one year. In a study published in Obesity Research (Vol. 3, July 1995, pp.
319-327), the researchers noted gender differences in the rate of body
weight changes after marriage, with more immediate changes in women than
men.
"Our findings show that women tend to change weight more in that first year
of marriage than men do," Sobal noted. "Other studies have shown that
during the first two years of marriages, husbands and wives tend to
exercise less and eat more but only husbands gained weight. Our previously
published study showed that married men are fatter and more likely to be
obese than never married or previously married men. These differences,
however, do not emerge during the first year of marriage."
The studies were supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health.
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