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Childhood overweight/obesity among Asian ethnic subgroups: are there ethnic and socioeconomic disparities?
Conference poster   Peer reviewed

Childhood overweight/obesity among Asian ethnic subgroups: are there ethnic and socioeconomic disparities?

Emma V. Sanchez-Vaznaugh, Brisa N. Sanchez and Maria Elena Acosta
Annals of behavioral medicine, v 60(Supplement_1), pp S576-S576
01 Apr 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaag012#page=S576
url
https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaag012#page=S576View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Disparities Obesity
Introduction: Asian child populations have remained largely invisible in obesity prevention science. While studies extensively document high overweight/obesity prevalence among US White, Hispanic, and Black children, far less data are available for Asian populations. Some studies report childhood overweight/obesity data for Asians as a whole, yet this broad category can mask variations in prevalence across ethnic subgroups. Data on the prevalence of overweight/obesity (OVOB) among children of different Asian ethnicities are severely scarce, presenting a significant barrier to the design of programs and policies to prevent overweight/obesity and promote child health across the entire US child population. Methods: We utilized statewide fitnessgram data on children in 5th, 7th, and 9th grades who attended California public schools in 2018. Using height and weight data, we calculated OVOB (>85th percentile for age and sex, defined by the CDC) among Asian Indian, Cambodian, Filipino, Guamanian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Native Hawaiian, Samoan, and Vientamese children, according to sex, grade and social class, defined based on the child’s household socioeconomic characteristics. Results: The analytic sample was comprised of 329,030 Asian children. We found substantial heterogeneity in the prevalence of OVOB. Within each ethnic subgroup, males generally showed higher prevalence of overweight/obesity than females. Wide disparities in overweight/obesity were present across ethnic subgroups. For example, the gender-ethnic specific overweight/obesity prevalences ranged from 72% to 11.7%. Samoan boys and girls showed the highest prevalence (70-72%), whereas Chinese girls (11.7) and Japanese boys (13.8) showed the lowest prevalence. These patterns were largely similar across the 5th, 7th and 9th grades. Within gender-ethnicity groups, overweight/obesity prevalence was higher among socioeconomically disadvantaged children compared to non-disadvantaged peers, and there were wide variations in the magnitude of the differences across Asian ethnic subgroups. Conclusion: This is the first study to document childhood overweight/obesity prevalence data on a wide range population subgroups of Asian children diss-aggregated by ethnicity. We found substantial variation in overweight/obesity within and across Asian ethnic populations. Policies and interventions are needed to promote healthy weight and reduce overweight/obesity disparities across Asian ethnic child populations.

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