Original Article

Are Entrepreneurs More Likely to Be Obese?

Abstract

Background: Entrepreneurs not only promote a nation’s economic growth but also increase employment. The risk of obesity among entrepreneurs may bring heavy economic burdens not only to the entrepreneurs but also to the national health care system. We aimed to examine the association between entrepreneurship and the risk of obesity.

Methods: We utilized data from the 2015 Harmonized China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey, including 2,802 individuals aged between 45 and 65 with complete data. This study used BMI (Body Mass Index) (kg/m2) as an indicator of obesity risk. Entrepreneurs were defined as those respondents who run their own businesses as main jobs. We used multivariate OLS regression models and Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to examine the link of entrepreneurship and obesity risk.

Results: The multivariate OLS regression results showed that entrepreneurship was positively associated with BMI (P<0.01). The Bayesian MCMC results indicated that the posterior mean was (0.597, 90% HPD CI: 0.319, 0.897), demonstrating that entrepreneurship was indeed significantly positively associated with the risk of obesity.

Conclusion: Being an entrepreneur is positively associated with the risk of obesity. As obesity can cause diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, the health departments should take necessary health interventions to prevent entrepreneurs from being obese in order to increase their entrepreneurial success.

1. Reid SW, Patel PC, Wolfe MT (2018). The struggle is real: self-employment and short-term psychological distress. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 9: 128-136.
2. Andersson P (2008). Happiness and health: Well-being among the self-employed. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 37: 213-236.
3. Gregoris M, Deschamps F, Salles J, et al (2017). Health assessment of self-employed in the food service industry. Int J Occup Environ Health, 23(3): 234–242.
4. Prottas DJ, Thompson CA (2006). Stress, satisfaction, and the work-family inter-face: a comparison of self-employed business owners, independents, and or-ganizational employees. J Occup Health Psy-chol, 11(4):366-78.
5. Hessels J, Rietveld CA, Zwan P (2017). Self-employment and work-related stress: The mediating role of job control and job demand. Journal of Business Venturing, 32: 178-196.
6. Toivanen S, Griep HR,Mellner CH, et al (2016). Mortality differences between self-employed and paid employees: a 5-year follow-up study of the working popula-tion in Sweden. Occup Environ Med, 73(9):627-36.
7. Field AE, Coakley EH, Must A, et al (2001). Impact of overweight on the risk of de-veloping common chronic diseases dur-ing a 10-year period. Arch Intern Med, 161(13):1581-6.
8. Zhao W, Zhai Y, Hu J, et al (2008). Eco-nomic burden of obesity-related chronic diseases in Mainland China. Obes Rev, 1:62-7.
9. Shi J,Wang Y,Cheng W, et al (2017). Direct health care costs associated with obesity in Chinese population in 2011. J Diabetes Complications, 31(3):523-528.
10. Baum CL, Ruhm CJ (2009). Age, socioeco-nomic status and obesity growth. J Health Econ, 28(3):635-48.
11. Dasgupta K, Solomon KT (2018). Family size effects on childhood obesity: Evi-dence on the quantity-quality trade-off us-ing the NLSY. Econ Hum Biol, 29: 42-55.
12. Merino VM, Urbanos-Garrido RM (2016). Disentangling effects of socioeconomic status on obesity: A cross-sectional study of the Spanish adult population. Econ Hum Biol, 22: 216-224.
13. Fang H, Ali M M,Rizzo JA (2009). Does smoking affect body weight and obesity in China? Econ Hum Biol, 7(3):334-50.
14. Pernenkil V, Wyatt T, Akinyemiju T (2017). Trends in smoking and obesity among US adults before, during, and after the great recession and Affordable Care Act roll-out. Prev Med, 102: 86-92.
15. Pan T, Palmer M (2018). Risk factors and non-communicable disease diagnosis in China. China Economic Review, 50: 72-84.
16. Geman S, Geman D (1984). Stochastic re-laxation, Gibbs distributions and the Bayesian restoration of images. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 6: 721-741.
17. Farhadian M, Moghimbeigi A, Aliabadi M (2013). Mapping the obesity in Iran by Bayesian spatial model. Iran J Public Health, 42(6): 581–587.
18. World Health Organization (2000). Obesity: preventing and managing the global epi-demic. Report of a WHO consultation. World Health Organ Tech Rep Ser, 894: 1–253.
19. Kivimaki M,Head J,Ferrie JE, et al (2006). Work stress, weight gain and weight loss: evidence for bidirectional effects of job strain on body mass index in the White-hall II study. Int J Obes (Lond), 30(6):982-7.
20. Brunner EJ, Chandola T, Marmot MG (2007). Prospective effect of job strain on general and central obesity in the White-hall II Study. Am J Epidemiol, 165(7):828-37.
21. Block J P,He Y,Zaslavsky MA, et al (2009). Psychosocial stress and change in weight among US adults. Am J Epidemiol, 170(2):181-92.
22. Nyberg S T, Heikkilä K, Fransson E I, et al (2012). Job strain in relation to body mass index: pooled analysis of 160000 adults from 13 cohort studies. J Intern Med, 272(1):65-73.
23. Tucker P, Rutherford C (2005). Rutherford, Moderators of the relationship between long work hours and health. J Occup Health Psychol, 10(4):465-76.
24. Averett SL, Smith JK (2014). Financial hard-ship and obesity. Econ Hum Biol, 15: 201-212.
Files
IssueVol 50 No 4 (2021) QRcode
SectionOriginal Article(s)
DOI https://doi.org/10.18502/ijph.v50i4.6004
Keywords
Entrepreneurs Obesity Body mass index Bayesian China
Rights and permissions
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
1.
Wang Y, Qu X, Wang H. Are Entrepreneurs More Likely to Be Obese?. Iran J Public Health. 2021;50(4):780-788.