Are Heavy Teens More Likely to Smoke Cigarettes?

While it's certainly true that smoking can decrease appetite, carcinogenous chemicals found in tobacco smoke can increase the risk of different types of cancer and other hazardous health conditions.

Now, recent findings have also shown that overweight teens are more likely to smoke than their normal-weight counterparts. However, study results show that this information did not influence these teens' decision to use alcohol or marijuana.

"Young people smoke cigarettes for a variety of reasons. For overweight or obese adolescents, the increased desire to improve social standing or fit in with others may also increase the probability of engaging in regular cigarette smoking," said lead author H. Isabella Lanza, Ph.D., research associate with the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, via Medical Xpress. "I think we will see this play out even more in the public arena with a new generation of youth being persuaded to try e-cigarettes and other forms of 'healthier' nicotine products in order to advance their social standing."

For their findings, researchers analyzed data gathered by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that collected information on teens' mental and physical health as well as their drug use in 1995, 1996 and 2001.

The data showed that young adults and teens with a higher body mass index (BMI) were more likely to pick up smoking.

"I think we will see this play out even more in the public arena with a new generation of youth being persuaded to try e-cigarettes and other forms of 'healthier' nicotine products in order to advance their social standing," Lanza added, via News Medical. 

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the article "Does adolescent weight status predict problematic substance abuse patterns?" via the American Journal of Health Behavior.