In response to the dramatic rise in childhood obesity, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other organizations have advocated increasing the time that elementary school children spend in physical education (PE) classes. However, little is known about the effect of PE on child weight. This paper measures that effect by instrumenting for child…

Newly developed assessments of nutrition and exercise knowledge, attitudes, and behavior were administered to 383 eighth-graders. Evidence for the validity of assessment scores was evaluated with five findings. First, parent- and self-reported behaviors were similar and congruent for healthy eating and exercising but not for sedentary behaviors or…

Social pressure to conform to the thin ideal is believed to play a decisive role in the development of eating disorders. In this field study at a college with only sophomore rush, 99 sorority women, 80 nonsorority women past their first year, and 86 first-year women completed three subscales of the Eating Disorders Inventory-2 (Garner, 1991), the…

Intuitive eating (an anti-dieting, hunger-based approach to eating) has been popularized as a viable approach to healthy weight management. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between intuitive eating, diet composition, and the meaning of food. The convenience sample included 343 students enrolled in a general education…

There is a significant association between birth weight and cognitive test scores in childhood, even among individuals born at term and with normal birth weight. The association is not explained by the child's social background. Here we examine whether mother's cognitive ability accounts for the birth weight-cognitive ability association. We…