There's a new incentive to keep kids' hands out of the cookie jar - a perfect attendance record.
A recent study by fifth-year School of Arts and Sciences graduate student Andrew Geier found that obese students are more likely to miss classes than are students of normal weight.
The study appeared in the August issue of Obesity.
Geier studied 1,609 students in the fourth through sixth grades in nine schools in Philadelphia.
His findings say that overweight children missed classes about 20 percent more frequently than their normal-weight peers.
Typically, studies try to correlate school absences with factors like age, sex, socioeconomic status and race.
Geier's study is based on a measurement called the Body Mass Index, which compares individuals' weights to their heights.
The BMI categorizes people into four weight categories: underweight, normal, overweight and obese.
Geier found that underweight children missed an average of 7.5 days of school a year; normal weight children missed 10.1 days; overweight children missed 10.9 days; and obese children missed 12.2 days.
Geier believes psychosocial factors like fear of bullying and depression, and not physical illness, is keeping heavier students away from the classroom.
"It's been my experience with working with overweight kids that this is too young an age for them to be getting type-two diabetes and things like that from their weight," Geier said. "This is psychosocial stuff like getting bullied and name-calling."
Dieticians at Penn see this theory as a very plausible explanation.
"The stigma of being overweight, the depression, the increase in bullying and teasing - I think that's probably the case in a lot of these absences that were noted," said Lisa Diewald, a research dietician at Penn's Center for Weight and Eating Disorders.
But Diewald also noted that weight-related health problems like type-two diabetes, high cholesterol, cardiovascular diseases, joint problems and asthma can affect overweight and obese children.
"In general, what happens, is they have more problems that older people have, but they're getting them when they're in elementary school, junior high or senior high," she said.
The school district of Philadelphia is already addressing the issue, Diewald said, by making school lunches healthier, promoting water over soda and gradually putting more emphasis on physical activity-based after-school programs.
Stella Volpe, a professor in the School of Nursing, echoed the need to promote healthy lifestyles among children.
"We really need to work as a society to make sure we encourage children to be physically active and be great role models for children to eat well," Volpe said. "This will prevent a lot of disease in the future and allow these kids to have a good quality of life."
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