Better-educated women are a healthier weight, new research reveals

However, Strauss and Thomas show that once women receive a certain amount of schooling, average body mass index (BMI) falls and they are more likely to be at a healthy weight.

“Behavioral changes have important impacts on health outcomes,” Strauss said.

For example, the average BMI of a Mexican woman — where 74 percent of the women are overweight or obese — declines for every year of schooling she receives in excess of just five years. There is a similar sharp decline in the average female’s BMI in South Africa after five years of education.

BMI is a widely used measure that accounts for both weight and height.

The United States was the only nation surveyed in which better-educated men had a lower average BMI than less-educated men. In every other country, the average male body mass increased with every additional year of schooling.

The findings appear in the latest volume of the “Handbook of Development Economics,” edited by Strauss and T. Paul Schultz (Yale University). The new book is the first update in more than 13 years to the “Handbook of Development Economics,” which has counted at least six Nobel Prize laureates among its contributors.

“Data has vastly improved since the last volume,” said Strauss, who is also the principal investigator for the long-term Indonesia Family Life Survey, which tracks more than 30,000 individuals.

An unmatched resource for scholars, the “Handbook of Development Economics” summarizes and synthesizes important research about economic development, including the role of institutions such as schools, medical facilities and fair court systems. Nobel Prize laureate Amaryta Sen wrote the first chapter of the first volume of the “Handbook in Development Economics” in 1988.

Topics explored in the latest volume, released in April 2008, include the decline of agricultural employment, the effects of changing fertility through availability of contraception or family planning programs, child labor and political corruption.

Schultz, T.P. and John Strauss. “Handbook of Development Economics: Volume 4,” (Amsterdam: North-Holland Press, 2008).