14 DAY TRIAL // Chubby kids and teenagers might owe their plump figure to more than their dietary habits and sedentary life style, a research recently carried out by British scientists suggests.
More precisely, it appears that how a baby was delivered also has a say in how much the kid comes to weigh during childhood and adolescence.
This claim is based on data collected while looking into the health and birth records of 10,000 children delivered in Britain in the 1990s.
As far as the researchers can tell, C-sections make a kid more prone to suffering with childhood and/or adolescence obesity.
They suspect that this is because these children miss the chance of being exposed to bacteria commonly found in the birth canal.
Daily Mail reports that these bacteria are believed to help better regulate an individual's metabolism throughout their entire life.
Therefore, those who do not come in contact with them during birth end up having a faulty metabolism that causes them to put on excess weight.
The researchers also suspect that the growing number of women who opt for having a C-section rather than naturally delivering their babies might also explain why the country is currently facing a childhood obesity epidemic.
Despite the findings of this investigation, several specialists warn that further research on the matter at hand is needed before drawing any conclusions concerning the link between C-sections and childhood and adolescence obesity.
"The other possibilities are that these are children that would have been heavier anyway."
"Being heavy as a woman is a risk factor for C-section, so that’s the problem with trying to figure out whether this is real or if it’s simply a matter of selection," stated Dr. Jan Blustein of the New York University School of Medicine.
A detailed account of this research and its findings is made available to the public in the International Journal of Obesity.