Food and the Family: Weighing the Power of Culinary Nagging

Library of Economics and Liberty
Parents habitually try to influence what their kids eat. "Eat up." "Clean your plate." "No dessert until you finish your vegetables." "Soda? No, you get milk." At least in the modern U.S., parents' main goals seem to be to (a) Increase the total amount of food kids eat, and (b) Increase the healthiness of the food they do eat.Does all this nagging actually work? You can't answer this question just by correlating parents' nagging with childrens' eating. As usual, we have to consider the possibility that the cause of the correlation is partially or entirely genetic. Maybe health-conscious parents sire health-conscious kids, and the nagging is just a lot of hot air.What do the data say? The best paper I tracked down was John Hewitt's "The Genetics of Obesity" (1997, Behavior Genetics 27). It's got very strong results: Nature can account for all of the family resembance in the Body Mass Index; nurture doesn't matter at all.

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