By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, March 19, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Genetics help determine whether a frequent diet of fried food will make you fat, according to a new Harvard study.

Eating fried food more than four times a week had twice as big an effect on body size for people at high genetic risk of obesity compared with people at low risk, researchers found after analyzing data from three U.S. trials.

Moreover, the more pro-obesity genes you carry, the bigger you'll get chowing down on fried chicken and such, the researcher said.

Such findings help explain why Americans' overall bad health habits don't affect everyone equally, said Claude Bouchard, chairman of genetics and nutrition at the Human Genomics Laboratory of Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, La.

"Our dietary habits and our lack of physical activity is driving the obesity epidemic, but the force of the behavioral driver is not the same in everyone," Bouchard said.

"We also have a biology driver, and that driver for some people is very minor," he said. "For others, it's a powerful agent enhancing the risk of behavior."

Other studies have noted similar interactions between these genetic risks and other environmental risk factors for obesity, including physical activity and total calorie intake, Bouchard said. People who are more sedentary or eat more are more likely to gain weight if they carry these genetic risks.

In the future, genetic testing could help reveal who is at higher risk of obesity, so they can take preventive measures, Bouchard said.

"It's not a sentence for obesity, but rather an increased susceptibility to obesity," he said. "Your peers can afford to have an extra serving or be sedentary and they will be OK, but for you it won't happen. That's important to know."

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Genes may influence weight gain from fried foods

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