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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 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.