Heavy mother

Heavy mother, heavy child

USA TODAY - January 24, 2005

Having an overweight mother significantly increases a child's chance of becoming overweight by as young as 6, a study reveals.

Scientists at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania followed 70 children from birth to age 6, regularly measuring their height, weight, body mass index (BMI, a measure that considers weight and height), percentage of body fat, lean mass and waist circumference.

Thirty-three children had overweight mothers and 37 had healthy-weight mothers. The goal: to assess the risk of the children becoming overweight.

Findings in January's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:

	At age 2, there were no significant differences in weight-body-fat measures between the children in either group.
	By age 4, the kids of overweight mothers were heavier, had higher BMIs and larger waists than the other group.
	By age 6, 10 of the 33 children with heavy mothers were overweight or very close to it (greater than 85 percentile on pediatric weight charts), compared with only one in the other group. They also had twice as much body fat.
	Children in lower-income groups were more likely to be overweight.

The study didn't examine the effect fathers' weights had on children.

'It looks like the time to intervene for kids' weight problems is during the preschool years, especially knowing how tough it is for people to lose weight and keep it off when they're older,' says lead author Robert Berkowitz, chief of child psychiatry at the Children's Hospital.

Researchers aren't sure how much of the children's weight problems were a result of genetics and how much was related to children's food and activity environment at home.

'There may be interaction between genes that are susceptible to obesity and the toxic environment kids live in -- large portions of food, too many sweets and fats, inactivity,' Berkowitz says.

Melinda Sothern of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans says the study adds to 'the emerging research that childhood obesity is a complex condition, and there are a multitude of factors that set a child up for being overweight.'

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