Married Couples Pack On More Pounds

Sociologist Jay Teachman, at Western Washington University, examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The data included info about more than 3,000 African Americans over a 20-year period. Teachman tracked body-mass-index, BMI, a measure of obesity, from adolescence to middle age. And he analyzed the relationship between BMI, marital status and changes in marital status. It turned out that living without a partner usually equated to being thinner and having a lower BMI compared with married people and couples living together. The single folks included the never-marrieds and divorced.