LOS ANGELES: Studies suggest that obesity is a family problem. But it’s not just parents who set the menu — kids have an influence too. Parents who give in to their kids’ requests for fatty foods, such as pizza, usually end up indulging with them.

Kids! It’s not bad enough that they leave their clothes on the floor, cost you a fortune and drive you crazy with worry. They also may be making you fat.

So says a study appearing in the Jan 4 online edition of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Compared with adults living without children in the home, adults living with kids younger than 17, on average, take in an additional 4.9 grams of fat daily. And 1.7 grams of that additional fat is saturated fat — the artery-clogging kind of fat that abounds in many meat and dairy products, processed foods and meals taken out from fast-food joints and eaten in restaurants.

The damage that children appear to wreak upon the diets of those who care for them piles up faster than the laundry. In a single week, the additional saturated fat intake of an adult living with kids amounts almost to that in an entire pepperoni pizza. And the litany of dietary offences committed regularly by parents and guardians reads like a nutritionist’s nightmare: adults who live with children, the study found, “had significantly higher odds of frequently eating pizza, cheese, beef, salty snacks, cakes and cookies, ice cream and peanuts.”

To Stacey Gordon of Torrance, the difference is an inevitable fact of life with kids. A fast food restaurant lies between her two daughters’ preschool and home, and she relents to their appeals at least once a week. Gordon, a full-time real estate agent in Los Angeles, says that each time she does so, it seems, she gives in to the urge to get a cheeseburger.

Before kids, Gordon says, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs and her daughters’ favourite cookies would never have been in her cabinets. Now, they’re not only a staple in her kitchen, they’re a quick and easy meal for her and the kids after a long day at work. “And I find myself making more cakes because they like them,” she says of her three- and five-year-old daughters.

The latest research is one of a raft of new studies that look at how family dynamics affect an individual's propensity to become overweight. As the rate of child obesity has grown, researchers increasingly have focused on how parental influences — genes, education, incomes, exercise and food choices — are passed down to children.

The latest study, however, reverses that perspective, suggesting what the authors call “a reciprocal influence of children on adults.”

“Kids can be very persuasive” in coaxing their parents and guardians into buying the fatty, sugary and salty foods that are overwhelmingly marketed to them, Davis says. “We’ve all been there. But as parents, we have to think twice about buying these foods for our kids,” he adds. “That they can make kids fat and start them down the road toward obesity is reason enough. They can also be very tempting for us as adults.”Laroche and Davis emphasised that children are not to blame for the high-fat eating habits of the adults who care for them. But they suggested that physicians who treat adult patients should be as aware as paediatricians have become that poor food choices can be a family problem, not just a challenge for the individual patient. —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service