A population-based cohort study sought to examine a controversial epidemiological claim about assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and the body mass index (BMI) of children.

It's only controversial due to corporate media coverage, the same reason some people believe that chewing gum and diet soda can cause cancer and that bacon is as bad for your health as plutonium and cigarettes. Like all epidemiological claims, especially those made by activists at France's International Agency for Research(IARC) on Cancer and Harvard's School of Public Health. it is only statistical "correlation", it is not science, it is placed over in the EXPLORATORY pile and if science ever validates the link, then it becomes legitimate. Correlation also found that organic food causes autism and that DDT led to higher sperm counts in French men, but science has not shown that there is any greater risk to your children by overspending on food created in a lab using organic-certified mutagenesis and sprayed with organic-certified copper sulfate.(1)



The data were 327,301 Danish children born between 2007 and 2012 in which 13,675 were born using assisted reproduction, 7,728 after ovulation induction, and 305,898 were born using no fertility treatments.

They found that frozen-thawed embryo transfer was associated with a 1.5-fold increased risk of obesity compared to fresh embryo transfer when comparing  comparing assisted reproductive technology versus ovulation induction with or without intrauterine insemination or when comparing intracytoplasmic sperm injection versus conventional in vitro fertilization.

That is 50 percent greater, call the BBC, who did wrap themselves in 'we just report the news' about chewing gum causing cancer the same way they printed Hamas propaganda claiming that Israel was mowing down Muslims with machine guns - no fact checking.

The authors don't do that, they actually debunk the weird claim that assisted reproduction will mean you have a fat kid, when science knows only eating too many calories will cause that.



My title is just to make a point about absolute versus relative risk. Yes, the absolute "risk" is 50 percent greater but the real risk is still meaningless, for the same reason that the American Academy of Pediatrics is wrong for scaremongering kids walking on Halloween or to school, or to eat vegetables if their parents are not wealthy.

Reproduction cannot determine a child's BMI any more than an astrological sign
 
The method of reproduction cannot determine a child's BMI later in life any more than an astrological sign can. There is no plausible biological mechanism for that but if you invoke epigenetics, the microbiome, and torture survey data until it confesses, you can correlate anything to anything. The Biden administration has taken this to the next level, stuffing government agencies he controls with allied epidemiologists who believe everything causes cancer and acting like a Supreme Court over Science, demanding that weedkillers like atrazine be undetectable at all or they are killing the planet - and EPA scientists are just too stupid to see it.

Such claims from Washington, DC are like 'proving' that people who read Welsh walk faster than people who read English. It's right there on a government sign, so it's as legitimate as 99 percent of the claims made by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.



NOTE:

(1) A century ago epidemiologists brought on a cultural panic related to greater coffee drinking in Britain. Groups latched on to that correlation and lamented English men would become Frenchified. 

It is as legitimate as claiming glyphosate causes lymphoma. It is also available on a coffee cup we send you for free if you make a $50 tax-free donation to Science 2.0.