Jun 29, 2009
CPC Fellow Penny Gordon-Larsen and her study on increased weight gain in couples who live together will be featured in TIME magazine’s July 6th edition and is on the front page of Time.com as a “Must Read” article.
Gordon-Larsen, Ph.D., an associate professor of nutrition at UNC, said that “married individuals are twice as likely to become obese as are people who are merely dating,” according to the article.
“With women, we saw incremental risk after one year,” Gordon-Larsen said in the article. “The longer she lived with a romantic partner, the more likely she was to keep putting on weight.”
Gordon-Larsen and Natalie The, a UNC nutritional doctoral student and co-author of the study, believe the weight gain may be attributed to the tendency for couples who live together to eat meals together, possibly cooking bigger meals of eating out more of then than when they were single, and may watch TV together instead of working out.
The, who lives with her boyfriend, said the study’s findings were “an interesting paradox,” but that it would not stop her from living with her significant other.
Gordon-Larsen and The’s research is based on data from the CPC-coordinated National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
This research also appears in The Daily Telegraph, The Herald-Sun, the Fayetteville Observer and CTV Television Network (Canada).
All articles can be found below:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1907143,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5507729/Getting-married-or-moving-in-with-a-partner-will-make-you-fat-new-research-shows..html
http://heraldsun.southernheadlines.com/orange/10-1170141.cfm
http://www.fayobserver.com/Articles/2009/06/18/909047
The UNC news release can be found here:
http://uncnews.unc.edu/content/view/2629/1/
These news stories reference this article:
The, Natalie S., and Penny Gordon-Larsen. Entry Into Romantic Partnership Is Associated With Obesity. Obesity. Advance online publication 9 April, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/oby.2009.97
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