Study finds correlation between parents’ weight and kids’
When it comes to predicting if your child will be overweight, the scale doesn’t lie. New UW research shows a child’s chance of obesity in adulthood is greatly increased if he or she has at least one obese parent.
The study, reported in the New England journal of Medicine in September, found that for a child under age 10, having an obese parent more than doubled the risk of being obese as an adult. An obese 3- to 5-year-old with normal-weight parents had about a 25 percent chance of being obese as an adult. The same child with just one obese parent had more than a 60 percent chance of becoming overweight.
The study did not address the question of whether nature or nurture causes obesity. “The risk is transmitted from parent to child by both the genes and the family environment,” says Robert Whitaker, who led the study while on the UW faculty.