What can you birth order say about your weight? According to a new study, first-born women are more likely to be overweight or obese than their younger sisters.
There’s a lot of research on the relationship between birth order, personality and health. It’s been linked with intelligence, political ideology and cardiovascular disease. For obvious reasons, many don’t hold up to further scrutiny and it’s probably best to take these findings with a pinch of salt. But what’s particularly interesting about this recent study is that it’s the largest of its kind and builds on previous research that reported similar findings.
The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, collected a range of data from the Swedish Birth Register, which included the weight and height of nearly 13,500 pairs of sisters. Researchers note that all large studies examining the effects of birth order on someone’s BMI – or body mass index – have previously been carried out on men, which prompted them to investigate whether there were similar patterns among women.
Researchers studied sibling pairs born between 1991 and 2009 to women who were at least 18 years old at the time of their first pregnancy. Twins were not included in the study.
They found that at birth first-born women weighed less than their siblings, but were more likely to be overweight or obese when they grew up. First-born women were 29% more likely to be overweight and 40% more likely to be obese, when compared with their second-born sisters. Also, the average BMI for first-borns was 2.4% greater than their second-born sisters.
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