London, Sept 14 (ANI): An overweight mother speeds up her child’s path to obesity, a new study has found.

And, this is especially true if you are European, the study further reports.

The study’s findings are based on a research that involved 571 New Zealand children of European heritage.

As a part of the study, researchers monitored the children from the time of their birth till they turned seven.

They found that kids with overweight or obese mothers had around 4 percent more body fat than children with mothers of normal weight, reports the BMJ.

Other factors that were found to hasten obesity in kids included spending too much time in front of the TV, and rapidly piling on the pounds in early childhood.

The researchers found that kids who spent more than 3 hours a day in front of the TV had 5 percent more body fat than those who watched TV for less than an hour.

The team also found that doing very little exercise also significantly boosted the chances of obesity, with every additional hour of inactivity adding almost 1 percent of body fat.

The study is published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. (With Inputs from ANI)