Health experts have been urging parents to try and curb the epidemic of childhood obesity by ensuring that some definite changes are made to the family's lifestyle, i. e., kids should be discouraged from spending too much time in front of the TV or the computer and should rather be encouraged to go out and indulge in some physical exercise.

Although adopting these measures is a good way to keep children on their healthy weight, researchers from the Ohio State University were interested in finding out whether their effect could be cumulative, i. e., seeing if families which adopt not one but two or all three of the proposed measures help cutting back childhood obesity occurrence even more.

Eating dinner regularly with the family, limiting the amount of time in front of the TV, and getting enough sleep were the three steps.

Epidemiologist Sarah Anderson, and her team, studied data collected from 8,550 four-year-olds and indeed discovered that those who followed two out of the three steps, were slimmer than kids who followed just one, while those following all three were least likely to be overweight.

"The more of these routines the children had, the lower was their risk of obesity. If children had all three routines, their risk of obesity was 40% lower than children who had none of the routines", Dr. Anderson said.