The Relationship between Individual Indicators of Socio-Economic Status and Excessive Body Weight among Russian Adults

The study is aimed to investigate the relationships between unique indicators of socio-economic status and overweight and obesity among Russian adults. Occupational status, educational level and income are considered as SES indicators and are utilized in a series of linear and logistic regression models to measure potential associations with excessive body mass. Taking into consideration the conceptual relationships among SES indicators, the great emphasis is put into multicollinearity diagnostics and evaluation of coefficients’ stability by means of ridge regression analysis. Based on the 20th representative wave of the RLMS-HSE, containing objective anthropometric data, it has been revealed that obesity among females is mainly associated with education (university trained women are less prone to obesity), and obesity in males is mainly related to occupational status (officials and executives have more chances to be obese). Overweight in females is positively associated with lower than median income level and negatively associated with poor education. Meanwhile, overweight in males, is negatively associated with economically inactive population and poor education. The relative effects of unique SES indicators on overweight and obesity could help to identify vulnerable groups and their effective targeting in social protection programs devoted to obesity control.