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Educating the Student Body
Figure 4-4 for an overview of these relationships). Collectively, these studies 
observed poorer future academic performance among children who entered 
school overweight or moved from a healthy weight to overweight during 
the course of development. Corroborating evidence for a negative relation-
ship between adiposity and academic performance may be found in smaller 
but more tightly controlled studies. As noted above, Castelli and colleagues 
(2007) observed poorer performance on the mathematics and reading por-
tions of the Illinois Standardized Achievement Test in 3rd- and 5th-grade 
students as a function of higher BMI, and Donnelly and colleagues (2009) 
used a cluster randomized trial to demonstrate that physical activity in the 
classroom decreased BMI and improved academic achievement among pre-
adolescent children.
Recently published reports describe the relationship between adiposity 
and cognitive and brain health to advance understanding of the basic 
cognitive processes and neural substrates that may underlie the adiposity-
achievement relationship. Bolstered by findings in adult populations (e.g., 
Debette et al., 2010; Raji et al., 2010; Carnell et al., 2011), researchers have 
begun to publish data on preadolescent populations indicating differences