A study co-led by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) in which the Universities of La Laguna and Lund (Malmö, Sweden) also participate, seeks to establish the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on the Body Mass Index (BMI), according to income and regions.
According to the researchers, there was a greater increase in global BMI, but also a widening of disparities in the hardest years of the crisis, differences that attenuated as the economic situation began to improve, the ULPGC detailed in a statement.
Using data from the National Health Survey over several years, both before, during and after the crisis, the study focuses its interest on the Body Mass Index (BMI), a variable that is obtained by dividing the kilograms of weight by the square of the height in meters, and which guides when determining whether a person is in their recommended weight range, below, above or obese.
The study crosses the data that this variable yielded both from a socioeconomic and territorial point of view, analyzing its distribution between population groups and between the different regions of the country.
This work has served to “map” the distribution of BMI in the population, achieving a better understanding of it thanks to considering the territorial factor and not only the socioeconomic one.
The ULPGC has emphasized the importance of this study to work on regional public policies to combat obesity in times of economic difficulties.
On behalf of the ULPGC, the professor of Quantitative Methods in Economics and Management, Beatriz González López-Valcárcel, co-directs the study, while on behalf of the Lagunera University, the professor of Applied Economics, Ignacio Abásolo, and the doctoral student Aránzazu Hernández, are in charge. The article that includes the results of this work is part of whose doctoral thesis and which has been published in the magazine Population Research and Policy Review.
Professors Maria Wemrell and Juan Merlo, from Lund University, in Sweden, have also participated in the research.
