American women seem more satisfied with their weight now than they were 30 years ago, preliminary new research indicates.
After reviewing more than 250 studies that included a total of over 100,000 participants, researchers found that women's dissatisfaction with their thinness levels significantly declined between 1981 and 2012.
"In the past few years, we've seen more and more of the idea of body acceptance . . . and more media awareness [of this issue] growing from societal influences," said study author Bryan Karazsia. He's an associate professor of psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio.
Karazsia's analysis comes at a time when the U.S. National Institutes of Health says that about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese.
But public relations and ad campaigns over the last decade -- such as the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty -- have attempted to promote body acceptance by showcasing models with wide variations in body types.
Prior research in the 1990s had indicated that rising numbers of women were unhappy with their weight. Body dissatisfaction, Karazsia noted, can lead to greater risks of eating disorders or depression.
The new meta-analysis examined changes in two aspects of body dissatisfaction over time, including thinness and muscularity. Karazsia and his team compared participants' average scores over each study period using specialized measurements derived from self-reported surveys.
[For more of this story, written by Maureen Salamon, go to https://consumer.healthday.com...or-women-713614.html]
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