Children are more likely to be overweight if their parents were fat.
People with chubby parents are far more likely to be overweight
A new study has found that the risk of obesity was six times higher in middle-aged people if their parents were also chubby in their 40s and 50s.
However, the danger was only three to four times higher if just a single parent was overweight.
Norwegian experts studied more than 2,000 families and looked at parents aged 40 to 59 in 1994 and their children at the same age in 2015.
They used body mass index (BMI) - which gets higher the fatter a person is - and found for every four points on their mother's score or 3.4 on their father's, the child's BMI was 0.8 points higher.
Researcher Mari Mikkelsen, from the University of Tromso, Arctic University of Norway, said: "We found obesity can be transmitted between generations.
"Genes play an important role in our susceptibility to weight gain.
"Some studies suggest that children develop similar diet and exercise habits to their parents when they all live together. Then obesity in childhood, and especially adolescence, tends to follow them into adulthood."