Long-term food stamp program participation is differentially related to overweight in young girls and boys

This paper examines the relation between long-term Food Stamp Program (FSP) participation and overweight in children using data on children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child Sample. A child was categorized as overweight if his or her BMI was >/= the 95th percentile of sex- and age-specific BMI. The data were arranged as a panel with multiple observations per child, and the preferred models of overweight included long-term FSP participation, additional demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental characteristics, and child fixed effects. Child fixed effects were used to take into account unobserved differences across children that did not vary over time. The models were estimated separately for younger (5-11 y old) and older (12-18 y old) children. In Ordinary Least Squares models, long-term FSP participation was positively and significantly related to overweight in young girls (P = 0.048), and negatively and significantly related to overweight in young boys (P = 0.100). Compared with girls and boys whose families did not participate in the FSP during the previous 5 y, FSP participation during all of the previous 5 y was associated with a 42.8% increase for young girls and a 28.8% decrease for young boys in the predicted probability of overweight. Long-term FSP participation was not significantly related to overweight in older children. Although these models did not control for food insecurity, the potential role of food insecurity in FSP participation was considered in the interpretation of the relation between FSP participation and child weight.