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Around 35-40 per cent of a child's BMI -- how fat or thin they are -- is inherited from their parents, a new study has found. For the most obese children, the proportion rises to 55-60 per cent, suggesting that more than half of their tendency towards obesity is determined by genetics and family environment.
The study, led by the University of Sussex, used data on the heights and weights of 100,000 children and their parents spanning six countries worldwide: the UK, USA, China, Indonesia, Spain and Mexico. The researchers found that the intergenerational transmission of BMI (Body Mass Index) is approximately constant at around 0.2 per parent -- i.e. that each child's BMI is, on average, 20 per cent due to the mother and 20 per cent due to the father.
[...] The study also shows how the effect of parents' BMI on their children's BMI depends on what the BMI of the child is. Consistently, across all populations studied, they found the 'parental effect' to be lowest for the thinnest children and highest for the most obese children. For the thinnest child their BMI is 10 per cent due to their mother and 10 per cent due to their father. For the fattest child this transmission is closer to 30 per cent due to each parent.
The intergenerational transmission of body mass index across countries (DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2016.11.005) (DX)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:11PM
You know, I'm going to disagree with what I just wrote:
people MOSTLY get fat due to input problems, not activity problems.
I really meant to say that people STAY fat mostly due to input problems, not activity problems. Getting fat is a process that often happens over many years and very gradually, and it can be caused by all sorts of things. Even a slight daily decrease in activity with no change in input can lead to a gradual weight gain of a few pounds per year or whatever. Anyhow, regardless of the causes of obesity to begin with, trying to combat it once it is noticed generally requires more stringent intervention in input, rather than merely exercise -- which was my point.
Or perhaps by "output" you meant to include other possible options -- like becoming bulimic?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:40PM
What's interesting to me is that, while poor people in food desert in shitty urban neighborhoods are understandably more obese from the lack of affordable healthy options and lack of safe exercise opportunities, the stats in rural areas are equally bad... I understand long commutes and cheap food, but the US' southeast isn't exactly a place where kids can't run around...
Once, I had to wait about ten minutes in the parking lot of a supermarket at the Southern tip of Illinois, I was amazed that 16 of the 18 adult women who passed by were visibly significantly overweight (3 in the morbidly obese range, including 2 on electric scooters). It wasn't a place you'd associate with high stress, forbidden roads and terrible weather... Poverty leading to bad input sure, and probably a dangerous tradition of finishing the extra food from a farming past for many, but not a place where you'd be structurally prevented from spending some of the excess energy (that was middle of the afternoon on a work day, so those ladies were not cubicle-bound).
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:46PM
I'm sure he was just joking.
Exercise was not much of an option for me. I had severe allergies and asthma, combined with my obsessive mother always wanting to keep an eye on me, basically kept me inside all the time.
Kinds of food? Lots of sweet stuff. Not much "healthy" really. Couldn't identify half of it because the crazy bitch couldn't cook worth a damn. But nobody dared criticize her. She had us all brainwashed to think all of that was normal.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday February 24 2017, @03:48AM
Kinds of food? Lots of sweet stuff. Not much "healthy" really. Couldn't identify half of it because the crazy bitch couldn't cook worth a damn. But nobody dared criticize her. She had us all brainwashed to think all of that was normal.
Sounds positively awful. So sorry to hear a story like that.
On the lighter side of such stories, this makes me think of a recent episode of This American Life [thisamericanlife.org] and the girl who grew up thinking that families only ate the same dish every night:
Alex Blumberg: Sometimes, a ridiculous belief will survive into adulthood, and it's our parents who are to blame. Robin didn't think there was anything strange about the way she was raised. She lived together with her sister and her parents in a nice house in the suburbs. She went to school like the other kids, watched TV and did her homework. And she ate the exact same thing for dinner every night of her life-- baked chicken.
Robin: It was like Monday, chicken, Tuesday, chicken, Wednesday, chicken, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, chicken. Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken every night of my life until I left for college.
At the end of the first week of college, when everyone's desperately trying to fit in and it's important that you act cool, and sophisticated, and whatever, everyone begins complaining about the food that we're being served. What was the hard stuff in the sloppy Joe? What was that mystery meat? What animal did it come from?
And I'm looking at these people like they are crazy. The variety we were getting here, every night, every night there's a different meal. I mean, one night it's mac and cheese, one night it's mystery meat, one night it's sloppy Joe. One night it's-- I was like, how can you critic-- I mean, it's a testament to what great chefs they must be that they can make a different meal every single night of the week.
And they just kind of-- they kind of stared, and they're like "What?" And I'm like, "What what?" What's running through my head is, wait a minute. These people are implying that they had variation in their meal plan for their entire life. It's mind-bending. I mean, I don't care what I learned throughout college. This is the revelation that has stuck with me. This is what I've learned. All of a sudden, like holy god!
Alex Blumberg: When Robin came home for Thanksgiving that year, she confronted her mother with the startling fact that everyone else ate things besides chicken growing up. Her mother just shrugged her shoulders and said, "You liked chicken." Robin had to concede the point. Even when they went out to restaurants, Robin ordered chicken. They all had.
Seems a lot of folks have really dysfunctional food traditions in their families. Makes me all that more grateful that my family mostly made home-cooked and balanced meals, and a reasonable variety while I was growing up.