Living in the South or Having a Low-Income Level Increases Odds of Being Overweight.

Socioeconomic status
Studies have shown that the lower the household income, the more likely the family members are to become overweight or obese. But researchers are finding that that relationship, which depends highly on race and gender, isn’t so clear cut anymore.

“The perception is that the higher socioeconomic status, the less likely someone is to be obese,” says David Allison, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “But when you drill down one layer deeper, you see things are more complicated than that.”

Socioeconomic status has a much greater affect on the weight of women than of men, according to a 2007 NCHS study published in Gastroenterology. For example, the chance that a white woman or girl will become obese increases as her household income decreases.

Surprisingly, the paper also showed that Mexican-American men of higher incomes were more likely to become obese.

However, there may be a more traditional correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity in children. According to the CDC, 22.4% of children ages 10 to 17 living below the poverty line are overweight or obese when compared with only 9.1% of children living in a household that generates four times that income.