Smoking and eating: a classic combination. Weird how more of
one makes you do less of the other. Teen girls seem to have caught on to this
link too (not teen boys though, more on that in a second).
Florida researchers, who wanted to see whether the desire to
lose weight played a role in tobacco use among teens, have found an association between dieting and regular smoking. Teen girls in the study who
started dieting during the study wound up being regular smokers at almost two
times the rate as the girls in the study who didn’t diet at all.
Boys, on the other hand, who began dieting and then stopped,
were 1.7 times more likely to start smoking regularly compared to boys who
didn’t diet at all.
Cigarettes in the home also increased the likelihood that
both girls and boys would stick with smoking too.
What does all this mean? If your daughter mentions dieting,
get her to stop, but if your boy mentions dieting, encourage him to skip
dessert? Parenting by science sure gets confusing.
Oh, and kudos to the researchers for finding teen
girls who weren’t already dieting when the study began.
