| Teenage girls who diet frequently also seem
more likely to smoke, according to researchers from Boston's Children's
Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.
In a study that followed students from 6th and 7th grade to 8th and 9th grade, respectively, researchers found that girls who reported dieting more than once on a weekly basis were about four times more likely to smoke as their non-dieting peers. Even girls who dieted less frequently -- once a week or less in the past month -- were twice as likely to become smokers. "In our study, over a third of the smoking initiation by girls was attributable to dieting," said study co-author S. Bryn Austin of Children's Hospital. The reason for the linkage may be that both dieting and smoking are related to weight control, researchers speculated. The study was published in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health |