Here’s an interesting study that seems to bear witness to the findings in the ACE Study that link child abuse — physical, sexual and emotional — to adult obesity:

From MedPage Today, a review of a study from the journal, BMC Medicine, in which Andrew Ternouth, PhD, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, with co-authors David Collier and Barbara Maughan found that:

Sad youngsters are more likely to grow up to be fat adults, particularly if the unhappy child is a girl, according to a British study of more than 6,500 adults who were born in 1970.

The study’s part of the 1970 Birth Cohort Study of 16,496 people who were born in England and Wales. More details:

The strongest predictors of adult BMI were BMI at age 10 and parental BMI.

Self-esteem, self-reported worrying, self-reported nervousness, and locus of control all significantly predicted weight gain.

There was significant interaction between emotionality and locus of control and gender — the impact of these factors was greater in women than in men.

Childhood emotional problems predicted weight gain in women only. Childhood self-esteem predicted weight gain in both men and women, although the effect was stronger in women. An external locus of control predicted weight gain in both men and women.