Overweight children are being excluded from friendships, study finds
In a survey of 504 preteens in the Netherlands, researchers found that overweight children are excluded from friendships, call classmates friends when the feeling is not mutual and are disliked by peers. And overweight children dislike more classmates than their thinner peers. These heightened negative relationships take a mental, social and physical toll , said Kayla de la Haye, lead author of the new study and an assistant preventive medicine professor at the Keck School of Medicine. "Our finding is alarming because if we continue to have social environments where fat shaming is the norm, these kids will continue to be ostracized," de la Haye said. "Those adverse interactions increase the risk of loneliness, depression, poor eating habits and illness." Although overweight children, on average, listed as many people in the friend category as children with healthy weight, they were 1.7 times more likely to be disliked and 1.2 times more likely to dislike th