Overweight and Obesity among Women in Urban India: A Problem of Poor or Non-Poor

The present study is an effort to examine the prevalence of overweight and obesity among women, with special reference to their economic condition in urban India. An exclusive wealth index for urban India was constructed using principal component analysis (PCA) for the analysis of overweight and obesity variations among women of different economic background in urban India. The study found very high prevalence of overweight and obesity in urban areas, more noticeably among non-poor women. Further result shows that prevalence of overweight and obesity increases with age, education, media exposure and parity of women. However, for all covariates, the non-poor women have considerable higher proportion of overweight and obesity than women of poor families in urban India. The multinomial logistic regression result also shows that non-poor women are 2 and 2.6 times more on risk of being overweight and obesity respectively than their poor counterparts. Education, marital status and media exposure also shows significant and positive association with overweight and obesity status in urban India. Thus, the growing demand which is appearing now before the health planners in particular is that, to address this rising urban epidemiology with equal importance along with other prevailing issues.