Obese kids more vulnerable to bullies.

[MAR]

Children in Grades 3 through 6 who are obese are more likely to be bullied than their normal-weight peers, a new study has found. No one who has attended grade school -- or who has even the slightest familiarity with children -- will be surprised by these findings. What is surprising, however, is that obese children are bullied more often even if they possess qualities that can discourage bullies, such as having good social skills or doing well in school.

 

 

"When we started this study, I really suspected that we might find that the obesity or overweight might not be the driving force," says the lead author of the study, Julie Lumeng, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. "What we found is that it didn't matter. No matter how good your social skills, if you were overweight or obese you were more likely to be bullied."

 

 

In the study, which appears this week in the journal Pediatrics, Lumeng and her colleagues followed more than 800 children -- all born in 1991 -- from 10 cities across the U.S. When the children were in the third, fifth, and sixth grades, the researchers surveyed teachers, mothers, and the children themselves about whether they were bullied, and also surveyed the adults about the children's social skills. They then compared these responses with the children's body mass index, a simple ratio of height and weight.

 

 

Overall, kids who were obese were 65 percent more likely to be bullied than their peers of normal weight; overweight kids were 13 percent more likely to be bullied, although that finding was not statistically significant, the study notes. This pattern persisted even when the researchers took into account other factors that are associated with both obesity and being bullied, such as coming from a low-income family or doing poorly in school.

 

Still, the findings don't rule out the possibility that being overweight and being bullied share a common, underlying cause, says Matthew N. Davis, M.D., a primary care physician and the director of the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

"There's always been the question in the back of people's minds about whether there was another factor involved which was related to both bullying and obesity," says Davis, who was not involved in Lumeng's study.

 

 

Sylvia Rimm, Ph.D., a clinical professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, in Cleveland, Ohio, suggests that the low self-esteem of overweight children may make them targets for their peers.

 

 

Rimm, who wasn't involved in the study, surveyed thousands of middle-school children for a 2004 book, "Rescuing the Emotional Lives of Overweight Kids." "Kids who considered themselves very overweight not only were bullied, but...indicated more loneliness, saw themselves as troublemakers, and saw themselves as sad, fearful, and wimpy," she says. "They really have huge struggles."

One reason that children might be more apt to pick on their overweight classmates is that they are taking after adults, says Davis.

 

 

"Children pick up behaviors from adults, so we always have to keep in mind how we're modeling respect for others around multiple issues, including weight," he says. "Imagine how many signals kids get about weight just by hearing conversations by adults or seeing advertisements on TV. The messages are everywhere in terms of trying to control weight and be a different size than you are right now."

 

 

Wendy Craig, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, says that bullying and obesity are both major public health concerns that teachers and schools -- and not just parents -- need to address.

Teachers "are like social architects," says Craig, who has studied bullying for more than a decade but wasn't involved in the current study. "They set the tone for what's acceptable. Teachers reinforce these messages every day in their classroom when they interact with kids."

In fact, positive interactions with parents may help prevent bullying in the first place, according to another new study, presented today at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Vancouver, B.C.

 

 

In that study, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, which included more than 45,000 parents of children between the ages of 10 and 17.

 

 

Children whose parents shared ideas and talked often with them were about 40 percent less likely to bully other children compared to the children of parents who said they didn't do those things regularly. On the other hand, the children of parents who said they are often angry with them or who feel bothered by them were up to three times more likely to be bullies, according to the study.

Interestingly, previous studies have suggested that obese children are more likely to bully others, in addition to being the victims of bullying. One possible explanation for this, Lumeng says, is that children who have difficulty staying calm and controlling their impulses to lash out at others may also have a hard time regulating their eating, and may eat for emotional reasons rather than out of hunger.

 

 

Overweight children are caught in a vicious circle of self-destructive behavior, Rimm says. "They're inactive, and they're sad kids, and they use eating as gratification," she says. "Of course, the effect is that continued eating is almost their only source of satisfaction, and so it's a terrible cycle."

Protecting overweight kids -- socially and physically --requires helping them break this cycle, Rimm adds.

 

 

"A key thing is to discover their strengths and get them involved and active in extracurricular activities," she says. "If they concentrate only on their weight, they're not going to build confidence."

 

NO SHIT?!

:bomb::headache::dunce:

[gasfacevictm]

Fat kids getting picked on?

Kids these days.

Shameful.

[Fist 666]

haha. no shit.

i wonder what kind of grant the asshat who wrote that got? i need to get some more BS degrees and start doing studies about 'kids that are different get picked on more than their normal peers'.......

 

what a crock of shit

[LEVEL 75 PALADIN]

[TreSixO]

Obese kids are more vulnerable to lots of things. Low flying aircraft impact, fast food marketing campaigns, gravity, bird strikes, etc etc etc

[Pet]

[hotsauceinthedickholewastaken]

fat kids are also willing to do tricks for pudding...this is all common knowledge.

[Pedro dePaca]

but are obese kids more vulnerable than 22 year old retards???

[hotsauceinthedickholewastaken]

but are obese kids more vulnerable than 22 year old retards???

 

the only was to tell is by punching them.

[NightmareOnElmStreet]

poor fat bodies......

[Decyferon]

People should bully the parents as well for allowing their kids to be fat bastards

[watson]

JUGGALOFATKIDS

[Boris The Butcher]

[hotsauceinthedickholewastaken]

 

for my 1000th post I would like to talk about eating her ass....glad we got to do this.

[Boris The Butcher]

[Boris The Butcher]

[Boris The Butcher]

[CALIgula]

hey....thats not the original pink dildo girl!

[injury]

as an ex-fatass myself, i would like to thank my bullies for helping making me into the angry, bitter, occasionally violent person i am today, i couldnt have done it without you.

[pissdrunkwhat?!]

Everyone knows fat kids get pushed down hills until they run that weight off, running for their lives.

[Dark_Knight]

[CityonSMASH]

i got big when i was like 24/25 after i stopping using. apparently its extremely common. going from eating little nothing on a regular basis to being in a coma like state for like 6 months sleeping and eating all day like a zombie wondering what the fuck happened with the last 10 years of your life.

 

but i lost all of it with little or no excersize and no diet pills or any other type of drug for that matter.

 

its not rocket science, you dont eat shit with fat dripping off of it, you dont eat shit dipped in sugar and you dont eat shit with more than like 10 carbs per serving.

 

to do this day, its extremely rare i eat pasta, and i was also not able to go back to drinking normal coke/pepsi.

 

if you combine that shit listed with cardio. the shit will peel off like a mutherfucker. shit even with no excersize it does, one your matabolism shifts and starts working harder.

 

easy.

[MedicineCabinet]

some just turn into fat bullies

[MedicineCabinet]

[LUGR]

Obese kids more vulnerable to bullets.

[armand hammer]

i do heroin to keep the weight down.

 

but no really they spent money to establish this as a fact?

[sneekatoke]

Boris for president!!

[BLU]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwMPnNEZZ70

[MedicineCabinet]

[.hopeless.]

i forsee that in a decade or so when the majority of people in america will be fatfucks that the tides will turn and the fat kids will join together and form their own gangs for protection and then the nation will be over run by gangs of hoodlums riding around on motorized scooters stickin up people in mcdonalds parking lots for bigmacs and shit.

 

 

niggas puttin it down.

 

the morbidly obese mafia comin down on you niggas.

 

krispy kreme kings up in this ho.