Study finds that one third of country’s grandparents are obese

The country’s obesity crisis is affecting the elderly with a major new study finding that one third of grandparents are obese and more than 42% are overweight — with clear links between their weight and contracting cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The Lifeways Cross-Generational Cohorts Study has tracked the lives of three generations of 632 families since 2001, initially via a randomly selected sample of 1,124 expectant mothers at a maternity hospital in the west of the country and the Coombe in Dublin.

In a paper published in the Irish Medical Journal, researchers have tracked the health of 1,244 grandparents aged 37 to 90 within those families, with indications older people are just as prone to the ill-effects of an “obesogenic environment” (tending to cause obesity) as younger generations.