Moms' full-time work tied to childhood obesity
The growing number of full-time working moms in the past few decades could be one of the factors contributing to the concurrent rise in childhood obesity, new research hints.
In a study of more than 8,500 UK adults followed since their birth in 1958, researchers found that the study participants' young children were 50 percent more likely to be overweight or obese than they themselves had been back in the 1960s.
When the researchers looked at factors that could be associated with the trend, they found that mothers' full-time employment, which was more common in the younger generation, appeared to be one.
The findings, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, do not prove that moms' full-time work, per se, contributes to the risk of childhood obesity.
One possibility, according to the researchers, is that children of full-time working moms have fewer family meals or less-healthy diets in general.
So the trend in mothers' employment over the past few decades may be one of the variables contributing to a general erosion in children's diets; the explosion in sugary junk foods on the market, food advertising aimed at kids, and the increasing availability of high- fat, high-sugar fare in schools are among the other factors that have been blamed.
When parents were obese, the odds of the child being overweight were three to six times greater than when parents were normal-weight.
Based on the data, the researchers estimate that in 1991, less than 8 percent of cases of childhood overweight or obesity could be attributable to mothers' employment.
In general, experts believe that a complex mix of societal factors — from shifts in eating habits, to greater reliance on cars and increasing hours logged in front of the TV or computer — has been behind the rise in childhood weight problems in recent decades.
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