ArticleInternational journal for equity in health2015
Cross-national comparison of socioeconomic inequalities in obesity in the United States and Canada.
Article in International journal for equity in health, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- A cross-national comparison of obesity using body mass index-for-age percentiles: results from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging and the United States Health and Retirement Study.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Embodying disadvantage: a theoretically-informed analysis of pathways linking socioeconomic position with all-cause and cancer mortality in a nationally representative cohort of adults in Canada.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Weight change among patients engaged in medication treatment for opioid use disorder: a scoping review.The American journal of drug and alcohol abuse · 2023Article
- The Geography of Pain in the United States and Canada.The journal of pain · 2022Article
- Controlling the obesity pandemic: Geoffrey Rose revisited.Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique · 2022Article
- A comparison of health and socioeconomic gradients in health between the United States and Canada.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Study on the Impact of Income Gap on Health Level of Rural Residents in China.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Mitigating the Impact of Socioeconomic Status on Listing for Lung Transplantation in Cystic Fibrosis.Annals of the American Thoracic Society · 2020Article
- Measuring Socioeconomic Inequalities in Obesity among Korean Adults, 1998⁻2015.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2019Article
- Precision nutrition: hype or hope for public health interventions to reduce obesity?International journal of epidemiology · 2019Article
- Income inequality and social gradients in children's height: a comparison of cohort studies from five high-income countries.BMJ paediatrics open · 2019Article
- Socioeconomic inequalities in obesity among Korean women aged 19-79 years: the 2016 Korean Study of Women's Health-Related Issues.Epidemiology and health · 2019Article
- Article
- Socioeconomic inequality in morbid obesity with body mass index more than 40 kg/mSSM - population health · 2017Article
- Obesity and socioeconomic disadvantage in midlife female public sector employees: a cohort study.BMC public health · 2017Article
- Early-Life Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Metabolic Health Disparities.Psychosomatic medicine · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionPrior cross-national studies of socioeconomic inequalities in obesity have only compared summary indices of inequality but not specific, policy-relevant dimensions of inequality: (a) shape of the socioeconomic gradient in obesity, (b) magnitude of differentials in obesity across socioeconomic levels and, (c) level of obesity at any given socioeconomic level. We use unique data on two highly comparable societies - U.S. and Canada - to contrast each of these inequality dimensions.
methodsData came from the 2002/2003 Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health. We calculated adjusted prevalence ratios (APRs) for obesity (compared to normal weight) by income quintile and education group separately for both nations and, between Canadians and Americans in the same income or education group.
resultsIn the U.S., every socioeconomic group except the college educated had significant excess prevalence of obesity. By contrast in Canada, only those with less than high school were worse off, suggesting that the shape of the socioeconomic gradient differs in the two countries. U.S. differentials between socioeconomic levels were also larger than in Canada (e.g., PR quintile 1 compared to quintile 5 was 1.82 in the U.S. [95 % CI: 1.52-2.19] but 1.45 in Canada [95 % CI: 1.10-1.91]). At the lower end of the socioeconomic gradient, obesity was more prevalent in the U.S. than in Canada.
conclusionsOur results suggest there is variation between U.S. and Canada in different dimensions of socioeconomic inequalities in obesity. Future research should examine a broader set of nations and test whether specific policies or environmental exposures can explain these differences.
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