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Being overweight or obese causes hormonal changes, which accelerate children’s development. Obese children grow faster, so they tend to be taller than their healthy-weight peers. But obese children have a greater risk of disease in later life, including diabetes and heart disease.
Drawing on data obtained via Freedom of Information requests and official statistics, the researchers examined trends in child height and obesity up to the 2023/24 school year. Child obesity rates have increased in deprived areas, but decreased in more affluent areas, reflecting widening socioeconomic inequalities. Meanwhile, inequalities in height have reduced: poorer children still tend to be shorter than their wealthier peers, but the gap is narrowing. Children in poorer areas are getting taller on average and the researchers suggest this is because of their increasing rates of obesity.
In England’s most deprived areas, the average height of 11-year-old boys increased by 1.7cm from 144.4cm to 146.1cm in the fourteen years between 2009/10 to 2023/24. The proportion of these children who were overweight or obese increased from 37.7% to 43.3% in the same period.
‘It might look like a simple good news story, as on average children in Britain are getting taller,’ says GP and researcher Andrew Moscrop of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. ‘But in fact it’s a complex bad news story, because this trend is mostly due to height changes among poorer children, and these are being driven by increases in obesity prevalence, which are themselves driven by unfair determinants of health.