Study Says Women With Mate Get Heavier.doc

Study Says Women With Mate Get Heavier 窗体顶端 窗体底端 Sign in to Recommend Twitter Sign In to E-Mail Print Reprints ShareClose Linkedin Digg Facebook Mixx MySpace Yahoo! Buzz Permalink By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Published: January 4, 2010 It is widely known that women tend to gain weight after giving birth, but now a large study has found evidence that even among childless women, those who live with a mate put on more pounds than those who live without one. Skip to next paragraph Well Share your thoughts on this column at the Well blog. Go to Well ? Related Health Guide: Weight Control | Overweight The differences, the scientists found, were stark. After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions. There is no reason to believe that having a partner causes metabolic changes, so the weight gain among childless women with partners was almost surely caused by altered behavior. Moreover, there was a steady weight gain among all women over the 10 years of the study. This does not explain the still larger weight gain in women who became pregnant. The lead author, Annette J. Dobson, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, suggested that physiological changes might be at work. “Women’s bodies may adjust to the increased weight associated with having a baby,” Dr. Dobson said. “There may be a metabolic adjustment that goes on when women are pregnant that is hard to reverse. This would be more consistent with our findings than any other explanation.” The study covered more than 6,000 Australian women over a 10-year period ending in 2006. At the start, the women ranged in age from 18 to 23. Each woman periodically completed a survey with more than