Smoking and Obesity (in your Children)

There are lots of people who give the excuse of weight gain as a reason to continue smoking. Many adults feel that increasing their risk for cancer, cardiovascular and pulmonary disease is healthier than gaining an extra 10 - 15 pounds. Now granted, unhealthy weight gain/obesity/adiposity (whatever you want to call it), is not an ideal health scenario, but neither is smoking. But, this blog entry isn't about smoking and weight gain in you, the smoker. Nope, instead it's about you and weight gain in your children.

I'm not sure how scientists come up with their ideas to study, but this one is very interesting. It's entitled "Changes in parental weight and smoking habits and offspring adiposity: Data from the HUNT-study." It can be found in the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity. Basically, they are looking to see if parental bad habits adversely effect their children's weight - pretty straightforward concept.

They looked at 3,681 children and their parents from the HUNT study. First of all, they found the children of parents who went from normal weight to overweight, had a greater incidence for being overweight themselves. I guess you'd expect that. After all, the kids are just following the cues of their parents and they're probably eating the same kinds of foods, as well.

What about smoking though? Well, they found that children of mothers who quit smoking had a lower incidence for becoming overweight than those children whose moms continued to smoke. This isn't just being a little overweight, this is childhood obesity we're talking about. These children are now exposed to a whole new set of risk factors simply because their moms smoke. Perhaps, it may be more accurate to say, they are at greater risk because their parents are not providing a healthy lifestyle for their kids to emulate.

This kind of puts a whole new slant on the argument that smokers don't want to quit because they'll gain weight. Perhaps they don't want to gain weight, but it looks like their kids are. An inverse relationship exists here between the mom smoking and the kid staying at a healthy weight.

The focus here should be simple: unhealthy begets unhealthy. So if you won't stop smoking because it's unhealthy for you, or if you won't stop smoking because secondhand smoke is bad for those around you, think about stopping smoking to help your kids maintain a healthy weight. Just be a good example for them.