Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Study: Hate Your Mom? You Must Be Fat!


"Hating your mother means you're twice as likely to grow up fat"

Children who have a poor emotional relationship with their mother are more than twice as likely to become obese, research claims.

A study found toddlers who struggle with their mothers are at higher risk of being grossly overweight by the time they are 15.

Those who had the worst emotional relationship were almost two-and-half times more likely to be obese at 15 than those with a strong bond.


Having a bad emotional relationship with your mother from an early age doubles your chance of obesity in adolescence

Meanwhile, only 13 per cent who had close bonds in their formative years became obese.

U.S. researchers studied nearly 1,000 toddlers and their mothers at play then rated how strong the bond was between mother and child.

The participants were then assessed for obesity at 15.

The prevalence of obesity in adolescence was 26.1 per cent among children with the poorest early maternal-child relationships according to the research, which will appear in the online Journal of Paediatrics next month.


I wonder how much of this has to do with cortisol levels, certainly if a child has less of a bond with their mother, they are going to be far higher. I have talked about how I think low-level unrelenting stress has jacked up everyone's cortisol levels, so why not in kids who fail to have a bond with their mother? Then there is the implicit fat hatred, I have seen myself mothers who far perfer their thin children opposed to the one who is fat by a young age. Are the bonds of motherhood even affected by societies hatred of that fat in some cases? I guess it depends on the mother and her values, but still remember the day, I saw a mother at a table at a restaurant cooing to a thin daughter and then yelling at a fat daughter, that she was a pig to want a sandwich to go with her bowl of thin soup. One thing that can be hurtful is watching how the thin children are treated in comparison to the fat ones, even via their care-givers.

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