Groundbreaking study links grandparents' smoking to your body fat | TheHill - The Hill

“One of the reasons why children become overweight may be not so much to do with their current diet and exercise, rather than the lifestyle of their ancestors,” the report’s lead author said.

In the 30th year of the Children of the 90s study in England, researchers have linked higher body fat in females to paternal grandfathers or great-grandfathers who began smoking before the age of 13, according to a report published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports.

“If these associations are confirmed in other datasets, this will be one of the first human studies with data suitable to start to look at these associations and to begin to unpick the origin of potentially important cross-generation relationships,” Jean Golding, the founder of the Children of the 90s study and the report’s lead author, said in a news release.

The Children of the 90s study, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, has been studying a cohort of more than 14,000 individuals born in 1991 and 1992, along with their parents, for 30 years.

Second, one of the reasons why children become overweight may be not so much to do with their current diet and exercise, rather than the lifestyle of their ancestors or the persistence of associated factors over the years.”.