Obese Teen Risk

Obese teenagers as likely to participate in risky behavior as thinner peers.
The Time (4/25, Melnick) "Healthland" blog reported, "Obese teens tend to be socially outcast, and so researchers had long assumed they were less likely to engage in the kinds of risky social behaviors that mark traditional adolescence: drinking, smoking and hooking up." However, according to a survey published in the May issue of Pediatrics, "obese teens are just as likely to participate in these rites of teenhood as their thinner peers. In some ways, obese teens' behavior is even riskier."
The Los Angeles Times "Booster Shots" blog reported, "Psychologists at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio compared the 'risky' behavior of 410 teens who were extremely obese (body-mass index in the 99th percentile) with 8,669 normal-weight teens (body-mass index within the 5th and 84th percentiles) using the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a national survey of high school students conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The survey asked how often the teenagers used drugs, tobacco or alcohol, had sexual encounters, and experienced suicidal thoughts or attempts."
WebMD (4/25, Goodman) reported researchers found that "extremely obese girls were about twice as likely as slimmer students as to have ever tried cigarettes or to be current smokers. Extremely obese boys were about 50% more likely than their normal-weight counterparts to have ever tried cigarettes or to have started smoking before age 13." The researchers also found that "although heavy girls were about half as likely as their slimmer peers to have ever had sex, when they did have intercourse, they were nearly five times more likely to do so under the influence of alcohol or drugs." CNN (4/25, Caruso) "The Chart" blog and MedPage Today (4/25, Walsh) also covered the story.