Intersections of Adolescent Well-Being: School, Work, and Weight Status in Brazil.

Socioeconomic and health disadvantages can emerge early in the life course, making adolescence a key period to examine the association between socioeconomic status and health. Past research on obesity in adolescence has focused on family measures of socioeconomic status, overlooking the role of individual-level nascent indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage. Using measured height and weight from nationally representative data from Brazil, we estimate sibling fixed effects models to examine the independent effects of nascent socioeconomic characteristics-school enrollment and work status-on adolescent overweight and obesity, accounting for unobserved genetic and environmental factors shared by siblings.

The Weight of Inequality: Socioeconomic Status and Adolescent Body Mass in Brazil.

The high rate of obesity among adolescents is a global public health problem that has recently expanded to affect middle- and low-income countries. Brazil, which is undergoing a relatively rapid nutrition transition and has inadequate health systems, is currently experiencing the consequences of increasing rates of overweight and obesity concomitantly with the consequences of generations of malnourishment. Given this scenario, Brazil is an ideal context for examining the relationship between family socioeconomic status (SES) and adolescent body mass, as well as how this relationship varies across very different regions within the same country and across the body mass index (BMI) continuum.