The impact of marriage and parenthood on male body mass index: Static and dynamic effects.
Level 3 - non-randomized controlled study
Longitudinal panel cohort analysis; level assigned by design analogy for non-clinical social science.
PubMed 28615139 · doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.05.033
What was done
Dynamic panel-data estimation was applied to longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1999–2013) to assess static and dynamic associations between male BMI and life events including marriage, divorce, spousal pregnancy, and parenthood in 8,729 men.
What was found
The abstract reports directional outcomes without exact effect sizes or confidence intervals: - Married men had higher overall BMI, driven by increases in BMI in the period following marriage. - BMI decreased in the periods preceding and following divorce. - Spousal pregnancy had no significant effect on male BMI, whereas male BMI increased in the periods following childbirth. - Marked contemporaneous correlations were found between husband and wife BMI over the course of marriage.
Why it matters
By examining dynamic transitions rather than cross-sectional snapshots, this study shows that male BMI shifts around major family milestones, supporting marriage-market and social obligation models over health-protection or selection hypotheses.
Limits
The abstract provides no point estimates, standard errors, or exact p-values. As an observational survey study, it is subject to residual confounding from unmeasured lifestyle and socio-economic changes, and findings from the US PSID cohort may not generalize across different cultures or healthcare environments.
Cited by
- supports Studies across both animal models and humans find that males tend to gain weight when they become fathers.