Fat News: Something else you can blame on your parents...

A blip in the "Morning Rounds" in the New York Times reported on a experimental procedure to help prevent childhood obesity - by intervening before birth!  According to the study, women who gain a lot of weight during pregnancy are more likely to produce overweight children and children with Type II diabetes (that'd be "adult onset" diabetes, which is, disturbingly, occurring in a growing number of children under the age of 18).  The study attempts to help pregnant women control and manage their weight during pregnancy.

More and more of what I've been reading blames obesity on childhood.  I know I read somewhere that as we are growing, we develop fat cells, too.  These never, ever go away.  It just depends on how much fat we allow to be stored in them.  This is why so many of us have such a hard time losing weight, and such an easy time gaining it back.

Of course, correlation does not prove causation, so I'm interested to know what the exact relationship between fat pregnancies and fat kids is.  A "link" is very vague, so I'm curious to know if this new study will show that childhood obesity can be shown to be caused by significant weight gain during pregnancy.  Of course, another possibility, which I'm sure this study will point out at its conclusion, is that women who gain weight during pregnancy have a predisposition to obesity, or a fat gene or something, that gets passed on to their kids, and it might not really have anything to do with pregnancy weight gain at all.

Science and statistics are fun, and the media counts on us being too ignorant or lazy to consider that a "link" really means jack shit.  But if they do discover that this particular "link" is an actual cause and effect relationship, I'd sit up and listen.

So questions I have for the researchers and for the New York Times:

1.) What does your sample look like?  Are these thin women, obese women, what?

2.) Are you trying to show that it is only weight gain during pregnancy that affects childhood obesity?  If so, you should have obese pregnant ladies in both your experimental and control groups.

3.) How are you going to control for genetic factors that may result in obesity (the "fat gene")?

Something to think about... and to blame your mom for.  "You gained 50 pounds while you were pregnant, and that's why I'm a cow!"