Researchers Suggest Limited Parental Influence on Eating Habits

A literature review and meta-analysis of global studies published since 1980 has reportedly found a “weak association” between parents’ dietary intake and that of their children, suggesting to lead author Youfa Wang that “family environment plays only a partial role” in people’s eating patterns. Youfa Wang, et al., “Do children and their parents eat a similar diet? Resemblance in child and parental dietary intake: systematic review and meta-analysis,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, November 2010. According to a December 8, 2010, press release, researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, National Institute of Aging and University of Zaragoza compared “parent-child pairs’ dietary intakes, by type of parent-child pairs (for example, mother-daughter vs. father-son), world regions and dietary assessment methods, and over time.” Their findings apparently indicated “differences in parent-child dietary intake resemblance, across nutrients and dietary assessment approaches,” with parent-child correlations for energy and total fat intakes weaker in the United States than Europe.

“Contrary to popular belief, many studies from different countries, including
the United States, have found a weak association between parent-child
dietary intake,” stated Wang, who noted “the influence of other players on
children’s eating patterns such as that of schools, the local food environment
and peer influence, government guidelines and policies that regulate school
meals, and the broader food environment that is influenced by food production,
distribution and advertising.”

In a related development, the Bloomberg School recently joined the New York Academy of Sciences and The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science in presenting Super-Sized World: The Global Obesity Epidemic, a conference featuring obesity experts on the latest science and policy initiatives. Speakers included Kelly Brownell, the director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, who addressed “default food conditions” such as “large portion sizes; too little access to healthy foods and too much access to calorie-dense, nutrient poor options; relentless marketing of junk food, particularly to children; and distorted food economics, driven in part by government policies, that make better foods more expensive.”