14 DAY TRIAL // A new study reveals that children who are obese tend to have parents who are more stressed out than the average. Canadian scientists at St. Michael’s Hospital, in Toronto, found that the children of stressed-out adults tended to have a body-mass index 2 percent higher than their peers.
Additionally, kids in this subgroup were found to accumulate weight at a speed 7 percent higher than that of their peers. The new study was led by investigator Ketan Shankardass, PhD, and is published in the latest issue of the journal Pediatric Obesity.
The research group warns that these are not low values, though they may seem that way at first. If this trend continues throughout a child's life, then there are significant chances that they will grow up to be severely or morbidly obese. These percentages are all the more concerning since they affect children, whose bodies are still underdeveloped.
“Childhood is a time when we develop interconnected habits related to how we deal with stress, how we eat and how active we are. It’s a time when we might be doing irreversible damage or damage that is very hard to change later,” says Shankardass, quoted by PsychCentral.