The obesity loss effect of returns to education from urban–rural and gender perspective: evidence from China

As the world’s largest developing country, China’s overweight and obesity rate is higher than the global average and is growing, have caused huge pressure on the environment. This paper investigates the effect of education on obesity and its mechanism on the basis of a large nationwide survey collected in 2022 in China. We find that education has a nonremarkable effect on being overweight but a remarkable negative effect on obesity. The education improved one unit and the likelihood of obesity reduced 25.2%. Mechanism analysis showed that education can inhibit the occurrence of obesity by improving nutritional knowledge, enhancing health risk perception, improving diet regularity and increasing physical exercise. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the effect of education on obesity is more significant in rural residents and female samples compared with their counterparts. Further analysis revealed that education inhibits obesity mainly through improving nutritional knowledge for urban residents and female samples and by enhancing physical exercise for rural residents and male samples.