We all know about the stereotype: The teen ‘Bad Girl’ who drinks and smokes and does drugs, and just generally bucks authority, as my mother would say. But, now, researchers have linked dieting to such risky behaviours in a way most parents would not have expected. Hint: Make them eat breakfast!
Dieting and risky behaviours like smoking and drinking go together
like Yin and Yang for teen girls…
What they did…
Researchers at the University of Waterloo mined data from more than 3,300 high school girls in the Province of Ontario who participated in a longitudinal school-based study called COMPASS. They looked particularly at the initial data, as reported by the kids, and a follow-up three years later.
What they found…
Researchers discovered connections between dieting and risky behaviours. In fact, dieters were 1.6 times more likely to smoke and skip breakfast, and 1.5 times more likely to smoke and engage in binge drinking.
“It might seem natural for there to be a connection between dieting and behaviours such as smoking and skipping meals, but the explanation is not so clear for something like binge drinking,” said Amanda Raffoul, who led the study and is now a PhD candidate in Public Health and Health Systems. “Our findings suggest that dieting and other risky health behaviours may be related to common underlying factors, such as poor body image. The link between dieting and other health-compromising behaviours is worrisome since 70 percent of girls reported dieting at some point over the three years,” Raffoul added. “Post-puberty changes often lead to weight gain among girls and there is incredible pressure from social media and elsewhere to obtain and maintain the ideal body.”
My take…
The researchers did not mention, for one thing, the persistent myth, among teen girls, that smoking will help you stay thin. That’s a natural Yin to dieting’s Yang.
Binge drinking? The researchers say girls want to achieve and maintain ‘the ideal body’. That’s a lot of pressure on a kid. How do adults (many of them, anyway) blow off steam? They drink. In the absence of any other means of releasing the pressure, and the inevitable availability of alcohol among teens, regardless of their age, drinking looks to me to be a natural option.
One more thing… I want to take this opportunity to reiterate my plea that everyone – especially growing kids – should never, ever skip breakfast! Nutritionists say that the ideal eating profile for all of us starts with a big breakfast, which we will work off through the day, followed by a light lunch and a small supper. That way, the food we consume later in the day is less likely to be processed and stored as fat during our relatively-inactive and sleeping hours. Not to mention that a week hardly goes by when another study on midnight snacking and heavy suppers comes out, claiming that late-eating increases the likelihood of poor sleep and the development or maintenance of obesity.
~ Maggie J.