Girls who are called "fat" as children are more likely to become obese women, a study has revealed.
According to psychologists from UCLA, if girls are told by a parent, sibling, friend, classmate or teacher that they are "too fat" as 10-year-olds, they are more likely to be obese by the time they reach 19.
The study looked at 1,213 African-American girls and 1,166 white girls living in Northern California, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., 58% of whom had been told they were too fat at age 10.
All the girls had their height and weight measured at the beginning of the study and again after nine years.
Overall, the girls labeled fat were 1.66 times more likely than the other girls to develop obesity at 19, the researchers found.
They also found that as the number of people who told a girl she was fat increased, so did the likelihood that she would be obese nine years later.
"Simply being labelled as too fat has a measurable effect almost a decade later. We nearly fell off our chairs when we discovered this," said A. Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor of psychology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and the study's senior author.
"Even after we statistically removed the effects of their actual weight, their income, their race and when they reached puberty, the effect remained.
"That means it's not just that heavier girls are called too fat and are still heavy years later; being labeled as too fat is creating an additional likelihood of being obese."
Co-author Jeffrey Hunger, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, said that simply being called fat may lead to behaviors that later result in obesity.
"Being labeled as too fat may lead people to worry about personally experiencing the stigma and discrimination faced by overweight individuals, and recent research suggests that experiencing or anticipating weight stigma increases stress and can lead to overeating," he said.
The data used in the study came from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. The findings appear in the June 2014 print issue of the journal JAMA Pediatrics and are published online April 28.