Researchers found that these factors influenced whether individuals were overweight or obese at ages 16 and 42, showing a persistent effect on weight throughout their lives.
Experts say the results highlight the need to consider societal and early-life risk factors when shaping obesity prevention programmes for children and adults.
Risk factors
Obesity is considered to be a global public health concern, but experts still disagree about the precise origins and causes of rising obesity rates.
One topic under debate is whether a person’s individual genetics and behaviors are more or less important than environmental factors, such as socioeconomic status, in developing obesity.
In the new study, published in the open-access journal PLOS One, researchers from the University of Edinburgh used data from the 1958 National Child Development Study – a long-term study that followed the lives of more than 17,000 people born in a single week in March 1958 across England, Scotland and Wales.
They estimated the impact of several factors on a person’s weight. These included societal factors, such as a person’s profession, as well as early life factors, such as how they were delivered and whether their mother smoked or was obese.
Maternal influences
The analysis showed that if a mother was obese or if she smoked, her child was more likely to be obese or severely obese at each of the ages examined.
Notably, these factors were just as powerful before and after the start of the rise in obesity rates in the UK around 1993, suggesting that the impact of individual factors, such as early life and maternal factors, likely did not change during that time.
The researchers also conclude that, since individual risk factors have not changed as obesity rates have risen, new studies are needed to identify societal factors that may have caused the current obesity pandemic.