LONDON, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- British researchers said nature plays a larger role than environment when to comes to childhood obesity.
In a study involving more than 5,000 pairs of twins, Jane Wardle, a professor at University College London and director of Cancer Research UK's Health Behavior Research Center, found that variation in children's body mass index and waist circumference were 77 percent attributable to genes and 23 percent attributable to the environment in which the children were raised.
The findings are published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
"This study shows that it is wrong to place all the blame for a child's excessive weight gain on the parents; it is more likely to be due to the child's genetic susceptibility," Wardle said in a release. "These results do not mean that a child with a high complement of 'susceptibility genes' will inevitably become overweight, but that their genetic endowment gives them a stronger predisposition."
