Getting Your College Degree Before Marriage Helps Prevent Obesity

New findings published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior reveal that getting your college degree before marriage can help prevent the risk of obesity in some individuals.

For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from over 14,000 individuals from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add health), which began tracking a nationally representative sample of youths in 1995 when they were in seventh through twelfth grade and 11 to 19 years old. Participants were surveyed in 1996, 2001-2002 and then again in 2007-2008 when they were 28-years-old.

"People who get married before they earn a degree from a four-year college are about 65 percent more likely to later become obese than people who get married after college," Richard Allen Miech, lead author of the study and a research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. "While a college degree has long been shown to be associated with lower levels of obesity, the results of this study indicate that the health benefits of college do not accrue to people who get married before graduating."

Furthermore, researchers compared the body mass indexes (BMIs) of Add Health participants before and after they graduated from college, specifically looking at the timing of their marriages.

"People who earn a college degree before getting married are more likely to navigate the changes associated with marriage without shortchanging their health," Miech said. "On average, the initial transition into married life is associated with weight gain, as individualistic exercise tends to drop off and food consumption increases. However, new spouses who graduated from college before getting married typically earn more money than those who did not and can invest in their health by purchasing such things as a gym subscription or healthier, more expensive foods."

The findings revealed that those who earned a degree before marriage were more likely to develop problem-solving skills that would allow them to properly move forward with obstacles that involved exercising and eating healthy when adjusting to married life, according to researchers. Establishing those patterns might be more difficult for some who would earn a degree after marriage. 

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