Casino Communities See Lower Childhood Obesity: Gambling Good for Weight Loss

A total of 17% of children and adolescents across the United States are affected by obesity, tripling the rate from a generation ago. Now, though, researchers have discovered that gambling could help lower these rates.

According to the study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, communities with casinos have shown lower rates of childhood obesity. The researchers believe that it's a result of increased economic resources after a casino opens. The research showed that casinos put more money into a community and help fund recreation and community centers as well as parks.

The researchers also found that every new casino slot machine per capita was associated with an increase in per capita annual income and reduced poverty, which is thought to have a great influence on overweight and obese children. Low-income children suffer higher obesity rates than the rest of American children. 14% of low-income, preschool-aged children are obese. And the U.S. Census found that in 2009 the number of impoverished people in the U.S. was the highest in 51 years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide more information about childhood obesity.

Jessica Jones-Smith is a professor at the JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health and a researcher in this new study. She and her colleagues analyzed body mass index (BMI) of American Indian children in 117 school districts between 2001-2012. Since Indian casinos are most prevalent in the U.S., the researchers were easily able to gather plentiful and credible information to compare such casino communities to non-casino communities.

"We speculate that casinos would boost family incomes, and having a higher income might make it easier to buy healthful food, and it might make it easier to engage in leisure time activities," Jones-Smith said in this Live Science article. She also noted that further research is essential and, along with other experts, noted that casinos in every neighborhood are obviously not the answer to solving this problem.

Overall, the BMIs of children living in the casino communities were lower than children in other communities. To read more about the JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health Study, visit the Journal of the American Medical Association.