Inductivist

I challenge people not on the right when the data don't support what they're claiming, so I ought to be fair and report when the data do back them up. Matt Iglesias and Richard Hanania recently claimed on Twitter that Trump supporters are fatter than (woke) Democrats. The table below (GSS data) shows that the average Trump voter was about 6 pounds heavier than the typical Hillary supporter in 2016. 

UPDATE: While lying in bed this morning, I realized I needed to look at the sexes separately since women were more likely to vote for Hillary, and they weigh less. I see that a commenter was thinking the same:

You can see that while male Trump supporters weigh more, female Trump supporters weigh less than Hillary voters. Maybe later I can take height differences into account.

UPDATE: Not much height difference:

We saw in a recent post that the women with poor health have the most kids.  Is this true for heavy women, too?  Yes, it is: look at this graph (General Social Survey, self-reported weight, N = 200):
















Women with one child are the lightest group with a mean of 165.6 pounds.  Compare this to the heaviest group: Women with seven children weigh an average of 208.5 pounds. The difference is roughly one standard deviation -- huge, no pun intended.

Of course, it's hard for a woman to lose the weight she gains from being pregnant, but it is also possible that genes underlie both weight and fertility.

For example, perhaps women who score low on conscientiousness (self-discipline, long-term planning) lack control over both eating and fertility.

Americans are likely to get fatter and fatter as the generations go by.  If civilization eventually collapses under all the dysgenic trends I have been documenting lately, these fat Americans might finally lose weight due to food shortages.

UPDATE: Readers might suspect that a respondent's weight is due to her height, and perhaps tall women are having more babies.  I checked: fertility does not vary by height. 

Does extreme thinness cause a woman to be less fertile? I looked at women ages 40-59 who participated in the MIDUS Study. I limited the sample to people with at least a 4-year degree. Here are the mean number of children by body mass index (BMI) classification (sample size = 369):

Mean number of children

BMI under 20 1.45
20-29 2.10
30-39 2.08

A BMI under 20 is extreme in this sample: this group is only 3 percent of the total sample. And you can see that they have fewer kids.

In the comments section of a recent post on religiosity, a reader linked to a study which found that young adults who attended church weekly were 50 percent more likely to be obese when measured again 18 years later.

GSS interviewers assessed the weight of respondents (below average = 1, average = 2, above average = 3, considerably above average = 4) and asked about frequency of church attendance. Here are standardized OLS regression coefficients:

DV = respondent's weight (sample size = 2,256)

Age .04*
Sex .02
Race .06*
South -.01
Education -.08*
Church attendence .02

* statistically significant

First of all, the bivariate relationship between church attendance and weight is zero. It remains zero with all the controls. Older and less educated people and blacks tend to be heavier.  Gender, living in the South, and church attendance are unrelated to weight.

I would still side with the AHA study since weight is measured more precisely in that study, and the data are longitudinal.

Gay men skinny, lesbians fat? Doesn't that seem to be the case? Au contraire, says the GSS. I've calculated means and added bisexuals to homosexuals because sample sizes are so low. (Interviewers rated the respondent's weight, scoring them as 1 for below average, 2 for average, 3, for above average, 4 for considerably above average).


Mean weight index

Straight men 2.18 (N = 812)
Gay men 2.26 (N = 38)
Straight women 2.24 (N = 949)
Lesbians 2.12 (N = 16)

Gay men are fatter, and lesbians are skinnier. Assuming this is correct, where would the stereotype come from?

Skinny guys have few children: The last post on sex and weight got me wondering about fertility.  Here are the mean number of children that people 40 and over have had:  

Controlling for height, Asian women are still the lightest by far: Continuing the topic of fatness, I thought a close look at how much women weigh would anger any feminists passing through, so I decided I had to do it. I looked at the National Health Interview Survey to calculate the mean weight of American women by ethnic group. Here's what I got:


Women's mean weight (without shoes):

Black 160.0
American Indian 150.3
White 143.4
Hispanic 143.1
Asian 122.3

Not surprisingly, the Black mean is a lot higher and the Asian mean a lot lower than the others, but this is an unfair comparison because of height differences. So what do the means look like if we focus on the modal height--5'4"?

Black 156.9
American Indian 149.7
Hispanic 142.6
White 141.7
Asian 125.3

A thirty pound difference between blacks and Asians, but again this is not really fair because of frame differences.

I also wanted to look at the age curve of women's weight:

age 18, 134
age 22, 137
age 26, 140
age 30, 143
age 37, 147
age 43, 150
age 51, 153
age 57, 156

From age 18 to 30, it only takes 4 years of aging to add an average of 3 pounds. So the 20s are the real weight gaining years, some of it due, I'm sure, to pregnancy.

After 30 the weight gain slows: it takes around 7 years to gain an additional three pounds until the peak weight of 156 is reached at age 57. After this age, the weight declines gradually and by age 82, women have fallen to the same weight they had at age 18. Some of this reduction is due to the higher mortality rates of obese women.