The change from child to adult is an especially dangerous time for adolescents in our society. From their earliest years, children watch television shows and movies that insist that "sex appeal" is a personal quality that people need to develop to the fullest. Teenagers are at risk not only from AIDS and STDs -- but from this sort of mass-market encouragement.
A teenage girl's weight, or perception of her weight, may affect her odds of risky sexual behavior, a new study suggests.
The study, of nearly 7,200 U.S. high school girls, found that in general, sexually active girls who were underweight were less likely than their normal-weight peers to use condoms. The same was true of girls who viewed themselves as overweight — accurately or not — when compared with girls who perceived themselves as normal-weight.
The findings, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics, "add to a growing body of literature that girls at the weight extremes may be at increased risk for engaging in sexual risk-taking behaviors."
Exactly why this is the case is not fully clear. And the current study found that the question becomes more complicated when race is considered — with weight and perceptions of weight having different effects on white, black and Latina girls' sexual behavior.
The findings also suggested variability in the girls' sexual activity and sexual risk-taking behavior based on their ethnicity and actual or perceived weight.
(1) Caucasian girls who believed that they were underweight, whether accurate or not, were more likely to have had sex and to have had four or more sexual partners. Overweight Caucasian girls were less likely to use condoms.
(2) Underweight African-American girls also were less likely to use condoms while overweight African-American girls reported four or more sexual partners.
(3) Latina girls of all weights were more likely to engage in a wide variety of sexual risk behaviors -- lack of condom or oral contraception use, sex before age 13, greater than four sexual partners and use of alcohol.
Sexual health
Read more!
