Fussy Eater? It Might Be in Your Kid's Genes

September 20, 2024
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Pulling your hair out in frustration with your finicky youngster?

Don’t blame your parenting style -- genetics likely played a huge role in their eating habits, a new twins study FINDs.

Fussy eating is mainly influenced by genes, according to findings published Sept. 19 in the Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry.

Further, finicky eating is a stable trait that lasts from toddlerhood to early adolescence, the researchers added.

Average levels of food fussiness remain relatively stable from 16 months to 13 years of age, peaking around age 7 and declining slightly after that, researchers found.

Genetic differences account for 60% of the variation in food fussiness at 16 months, and their influence increased to 74% and more as toddlers grew into tweens, results showed.

“Food fussiness is common among children and can be a major source of anxiety for parents and caregivers, who often blame themselves for this behaviour or are blamed by others,” said lead researcher Zeynep Nas, a postdoctoral researcher with the University College London (UCL).

“We hope our finding that fussy eating is largely innate may help to alleviate parental blame. This behavior is not a result of parenting,” Nas added in a UCL news release. “Our study also shows that fussy eating is not necessarily just a ‘phase,’ but may follow a persistent trajectory.”

For the study, researchers tracked 2,400 sets of twins through age 13.

Parents regularly filled out questionnaires about their kids’ eating behaviors. Fussy eating is defined as a tendency to eat only a small range of foods due to dislike of certain textures or tastes, and a reluctance to try new foods.

To help tease out genetic influences, researchers compared fraternal twins, who share 50% of their genes, with identical twins who share 100% of their genes.

It turned out that fraternal twins were much less similar in their picky eating than identical twins, pointing to a large genetic influence in the behavior.

Fussy eating patterns among identical twins also started to become more different as the kids got older, indicating that environmental factors start to shape eating behaviors for tweens and teens.

“While genetic factors are the predominant influence for food fussiness, environment also plays a supporting role,” said senior researcher Clare Lewellyn, an associate professor of obesity with UCL. “Shared environmental factors, such as sitting down together as a family to eat meals, may only be significant in toddlerhood.”

“This suggests that interventions to help children eat a wider range of foods, such as repeatedly exposing children to the same foods regularly and offering a variety of fruits and vegetables, may be most effective in the very early years,” Lewellyn added.

Environmental factors accounted for about a quarter of individual differences between children when it came to picky eating, researchers estimated.

“Although fussy eating has a strong genetic component and can extend beyond early childhood, this doesn’t mean it is fixed,” said senior researcher Alison Fildes, an academic fellow with the University of Leeds. “Parents can continue to support their children to eat a wide variety of foods throughout childhood and into adolescence, but peers and friends might become a more important influence on children’s diets as they reach their teens."

More information

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has more on feeding a picky eater.

SOURCE: University College London, news release, Sept. 19, 2024

Parenting Genetics Child Psychology Eating / Appetite Disorders