Your height and weight may affect income

London, March 9: Men who are shorter in height and women who are obese are more likely to be socio-economically deprived with lower levels of education, occupation, and income, suggests new research. “These data support evidence that height and BMI play an important partial role in determining several aspects of a person’s socio-economic status, especially women’s BMI (body mass index) for income and deprivation and men’s height for education, income, and job class,” said lead researcher Timothy Frayling, professor at University of Exeter in Britain. The researchers tested whether genetic variants influencing height or BMI play a direct (causal) role in socio-economic status. They alysed genetic variants with known effects on height and body mass index from 119,000 individuals aged between 40 and 70 in the Britain’s Biobank — a database of biological information from half a million British adults — using a technique called Mendelian randomisation. (IANS)