High School Experiences Linked to Midlife Body Weight

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

High schools have long been recognized for shaping students’ futures. According to a new study by researchers from Penn State, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota, high schools may even contribute to how much a person weighs later in life.

The study, published in Social Science and Medicine, highlighted associations between many aspects of students’ lives during high school and their weight decades later at midlife. Attending private high schools, schools with more socioeconomic resources and in-school experiences—like taking more advanced classes and increased popularity—were all correlated with a healthier midlife weight.

Using data collected in the 1980s as part of the National Center for Education Statistics’ High School & Beyond Study and a midlife follow-up of the participants when they were in their early 50s, the researchers investigated how academic, personal and social dimensions of students’ high school lives were related to midlife weight individually and in multivariate models, which consider multiple variable together to identify potential connections and patterns.

Researchers found that family and school socioeconomic status (SES), school type and curricular tracks were all related to midlife weight, with stronger associations for women. Among women, popularity was also associated with midlife weight. Even in multivariate models, the researchers said, family and school and popularity were strong predictors of women’s midlife body mass index (BMI) along with academic attainment, which was also significantly associated with weight.

Women and girls face more weight scrutiny, judgment and expectations to be thin than male peers, Frisco said, which led the team to expect that family SES, social groupings and curricular tracks could matter more for women’s weight than men’s weight.

The team said their findings suggest that individuals whose families and schools had a higher SES had a “leg up” on avoiding obesity as adults. They hypothesized that this is due to the way that families, schools and other students foster “health lifestyles” or normative expectations about what people eat, the activities they participate in, and ideals about the importance of being slender and athletic.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-high-school-linked-midlife-body.html