08 March 2024 , 13:22
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A new study suggests that if both your mum and dad were overweight during their middle age, you're six times more likely to be too.
If just one parent was, then your chances triple, according to the research to be presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice, Italy. The scientists looked at how tall people were and how much they weighed. They found a strong link between the body mass index (BMI) of parents when they were 40-59 years old and their children at the same age.
Lead researcher Mari Mikkelsen, of the Department of Community Medicine, UiT Arctic University of Norway, said: "From previous studies we know that several factors contribute to the shared obesity status between parents and their children. Genes play an important role by affecting our susceptibility to weight gain and influence how we respond to obesogenic environments in which it can be easy to eat unhealthily.
"Some studies also speculate that children tend to develop similar dietary and exercise habits to their parents when they all live together under the same roof, resulting in a similar BMI status.", reports Wales Online.
"Obesity in childhood, and especially in adolescence, tends to follow the individual into early adulthood and so we suspected it would also follow them into middle age. We found that this is indeed the case children whose parents lived with obesity are much more likely to be living with obesity themselves when they are in their 40s and 50s, long after they have left home."
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The researchers looked at data from the Tromso Study, a major health study in Norway. They included everyone who was between 40 and 59 years old during the seventh part of the study (done in 2015-2016), and whose parents were in the fourth part (in 1994-1995) at the same age. This gave them information on 2,068 families.
When both parents were obese in the middle of their lives, their kids were six times more likely to be obese too when they got to that age, compared to adults whose parents were a normal weight. If only the mum was very overweight, the child's chances were 3.44 times higher, and if just the dad was, the chances were 3.74 times higher.
Ms Mikkelsen said: "It can't be established from our analyses whether this is due to genes or environment but we are most likely looking at a combination of the two. Whatever the explanation, our finding that obesity that is transmitted between generations can persist well into adulthood underlines the importance of treating and preventing obesity, a condition that contributes significantly to ill health and premature death.
"It also lays the foundation for research into factors that influence the intergenerational transmission of obesity and that can be targeted to prevent offspring from spending their whole life affected by obesity."