The Mediterranean diet may act as a protective factor against the genetic risk of obesity in European preadolescents.

This is demonstrated by a study, led by the GENUD group (IIS Aragón and the University of Zaragoza), which has just been published in the journal Pediatric Obesity with an analysis of 2000 participants, aged 2 to 16, over three different years

The Mediterranean diet may mitigate the genetic risk of obesity in preadolescents. This is the conclusion of an international study led by researchers from the group. GENUD (IIS Aragón / University of Zaragoza), recently published in the magazine Pediatric ObesityThe study analyzes the interaction between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and genetic predisposition to obesity, and how this relationship affects adiposity markers such as body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) throughout growth.

The research, titled «Mediterranean diet and obesity polygenic risk interaction on adiposity in European children: The IDEFICS/I.Family Study», was led by researchers Miguel Seral-Cortés and Luis A. Moreno, together with a large European consortium. It is part of the European project IDEFICS/I.Family, funded by the European Union's Framework Programmes VI and VII and focused on the study of determinants of child health in eight European countries.

The study included almost 2.000 participants aged between 2 and 16 years, with follow-up at three different times (2007, 2009 and 2013), with A total of 5.538 repeated measures and 1.254 adolescents evaluated longitudinallyTheir dietary habits were assessed using validated questionnaires, and a Mediterranean diet adherence index (MDS) was calculated, as well as a genetic risk score for obesity based on millions of genetic variants across the entire genome.

Among the main results of this study, the analysis revealed that in In children with a high genetic predisposition, greater adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with a lower BMI during early adolescence (around age 12). However, in childhood (around age 6), high adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with a slightly higher BMI, which could be due to different biological mechanisms specific to each developmental stage.

On the other hand, this study has shown that the consumption of vegetables and legumes has an inverse association with adiposity indicators, regardless of genetic risk, reinforcing the recommendation to promote its consumption in childhood. Furthermore, in longitudinal analyses, no significant effects of the change in the Mediterranean diet on adiposity markers were found, which suggests that maintaining a healthy diet continuously from an early age may be more effective than making one-off changes.

These results support the Importance of promoting healthy eating patterns such as the Mediterranean diet from childhood, to counteract the genetic predisposition to obesity. "Our findings reinforce the role of diet as a modulating factor in genetic risk and offer key information for the design of personalized strategies to prevent childhood obesity," said Miguel Seral-Cortés, lead author of the study.

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El full article can be consulted in the magazine Pediatric Obesity