Overweight parents pass on the health problem to their children. This is the conclusion of a new study. Having one parent with obesity triples the risk of obesity. If mother and father are both obese, the risk increases sixfold.
Norwegian scientists examined data from the Tromso study, a long-term health survey among 45,000 individuals in Norway. Anyone who was between 40 and 59 years old when he or she participated in the seventh phase of the study (between 2015 and 2016) and whose parents at the same age participated in the fourth phase (between 1994 and 1995) was included as a participant in the new study. This resulted in 2,068 subjects with a parent-child relationship.
After thorough analysis, it appears that children of overweight parents are themselves susceptible to developing obesity. More specifically, if both parents were obese in middle age, their children were six times as likely to become obese themselves in middle age than adults whose parents were at a healthier weight. When only the mother was obese, the child was 3.44 times more likely to become obese. If only the father was obese, the child was 3.74 times more likely to struggle with excess weight later in life. These results will be officially presented in mid-May at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice, Italy.
“It is speculated that children tend to develop similar dietary and exercise habits as their parents when living under the same roof, resulting in a similar BMI,” said lead researcher Mari Mikkelsen, from the University of Norway in the run-up to the study. conference in an interview with Medscape medical news. “Our genes also play an important role because they influence our susceptibility to weight gain. They also influence our response in obesogenic environments where it can be easy to eat unhealthy foods.”
“Obesity in childhood, and especially in adolescence, tends to follow the individual into early adulthood. That’s why we suspected that this also happens in middle age. We found that this is indeed the case: children whose parents lived with obesity are much more likely to live with obesity themselves in their 40s and 50s, long after they leave home. Our analyzes cannot determine whether this is due to genes or the environment, but it is most likely a combination of both.”
