Life in the couple can bring a lot of satisfaction, but also a few extra kilos, a new study by Polish researchers shows.
According to the research, married men are at three times higher risk of becoming obese compared to the unmarried.
The study, which will be presented at the European Congress for Obesity in Spain in May, analyzed over 2,400 Polish adults aged 50 years. The researchers found that the risk of accumulating extra pounds increases for both sexes after marriage.
But the differences are significant between women and men. While married women have a 39% higher risk of being overweight compared to unmarried ones, in men this percentage reaches 62%. Moreover, when it comes to obesity itself (a body mass index over 30), married men have a risk 3.2 times higher than the unmarried.
Interestingly, the major difference does not appear in women. Dr. Alicja Cicha-Mikolajczyk of the National Institute of Cardiology in Warsaw explains this phenomenon in terms of social pressure: “obese women are more often stigmatized by society” and “they cannot accept to live with obesity”, thus being more motivated to take measures to lose weight.
