If there’s one aspect of the child-rearing process that deserves more attention and consideration, it’s the effects on the male body.
No no, but there is a study out today that looked at 10,253 men and found that young, first-time dads gained an average of 4.4 pounds, while their childless peers actually lost 1.4 pounds. Researchers at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine are calling this the “fatherhood effect,” a mildly academic take on “dad bod.”
“I’ve been studying fathers for a while now,” lead researcher Craig Garfield told me, “and I’ve always been interested in how becoming a father leads men to think about what they’re doing with their lives.”
What Garfield has found is a renewed sense of interest in health, if not to be good role models then because men want to live to see their children grow and prosper. In that way, the weight-gain findings are a little unexpected.
But reason and action are not the fondest of bedfellows. Garfield and colleagues speculate that despite noble intentions, new fathers eventually end up with less time and energy to exercise
This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.
