According to a new study, low-income families’ children often seem to pick up the stress of their anxious mothers and develop poor eating habits that increase their risk of becoming overweight.

The study author Craig Gundersen, who is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, says that: “Most of the low-income family children in the US have access to a sufficient amount of food and when these children experience maternal stress, they feel anxious and tend to go for the so-called ‘comfort foods’ that don’t prove the healthiest for them.”

The study finds that almost 17 percent of the American children between the ages of 2 and 19 are overweight, and another 16.5 percent are about to become obese.