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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #155: Is general education the best tool for preventing obesity?

Follow me on Twitter: @foodhealthfactsFind all previously published Food and Health Facts hereThe Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth will be hosting an online conference, focused on food and agriculture, April 26-28. More information is available here.

As noted in Monday’s email, I recently listened to a thought-provoking podcast featuring Peter Attia, MD, interviewing David Allison, a long-time obesity researcher and currently the Dean of Indiana University’s School of Public Health. I highly recommend listening to the entire 140-minute interview. In the passage below, Allison discusses the intervention that he believes could most effectively improve public health outcomes – and address obesity in particular. (The text has been lightly edited for clarity.)

There is a provocative data – I don't want to say definitive data – strongly suggesting that general education [and not nutrition education], especially for girls and women, leads to lower BMI, lesser rates of obesity, and less diabetes. . . . There are some studies in Europe of policies where someone puts in a policy and it effectively gives a cohort of people more education, and then you see in that cohort, less obesity, especially among women.

There's a famous study by the Rameys, who were a husband wife investigative team . . . and they started this study decades ago at the University of North Carolina. It was sort of Head Start on steroids. They called it the Abecedarian Project and . . . it was mostly just general education. There may have been a little nutrition education, but mostly general education. It wasn't a weight loss study; wasn't intended to be. Thirty years later, they follow them up, there's a paper in Science about this. Guess what? The women have less obesity.

The Moving to Opportunity study, funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, took families who lived in so-called poor neighborhoods, and they randomly assigned them – either to [a control group] and they basically got nothing or to housing vouchers. But the housing vouchers required that they move to less poor neighborhoods. And what they found years later . . . published in Science and in the [American Journal of Public Health] is that there was less obesity and diabetes in those assigned to move to the less poor neighborhoods, and given the financial wherewithal to do so.

These are things that suggest to me that general education may help, and I think that may speak to this whole socio-economic thing we started at way earlier. What is it about higher socioeconomic status that at least in some groups, not all, at least in white women, seems to be associated with less obesity? I don't know what the causal mechanisms are, but that might be my best [guess].