Childhood Obesity: An Argumentative Analysis

The amount of children that suffer from childhood obesity and overweight has grown within the past few decades. About every one in three children are considered either overweight or obese. Nicole Black, David W. Johnston, and Anna Peeters noticed that there have been a number of different studies conducted that suggest that childhood obesity can affect the child’s cognition level in a negative way. They looked at past research and decided to look for a causal relationship between obesity and cognition levels. They also wanted to know if the relationship of cognitive levels and obesity are considered contemporaneous or cumulative along with the different associations based on age. Before Black, Johnston, and Peeters came up with their hypothesis, they looked at different studies that have already been conducted to look at the relationship between obesity and cognition levels. The first thing they looked
The results for the males showed that the test scores of the obese boys scored lower than the normal weight boys. Their math scores went down by 0.22 and their literacy scores went down by 0.20. The psychologist went back and added in different characteristics into the model and noticed that the association between the scores were weaker, but there still was a notable difference. The results of the test on the boys clearly showed the negative correlation between obesity and cognition, but they could not be explained by past cognitive levels, time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, or sociodemographic characteristics. The results for the girls test showed that the obese girls scored lower on the math by 0.32 and literacy by 0.43. Once covariates were included, the obese girls didn’t score any lower than the normal weight girls. This shows that the covariates for the parental education and preschool test scores are important. The results for the girls did not show a negative