“…All in all, BMI is nevertheless one of the most marked determinants of WHR (Molarius et al, 1999;Lahti-Koski et al, 2000a;Kuh et al, 2002). Apart from its inverse relation to social class (Brunner et al, 1998;Lahmann et al, 2000) and level of education (Marti et al, 1991;LahtiKoski et al, 2000a), WHR has been shown to be associated with several lifestyle factors, such as alcohol consumption (Laws et al, 1990;Sakurai et al, 1997;Dallongeville et al, 1998), smoking (Laws et al, 1990), high intake of dietary saturated fats (Ward et al, 1994), physical inactivity (Laws et al, 1990;Trichopoulou et al, 2001), increased stress and anxiety (Lloyd et al, 1996), shiftwork (van Amelsvoort et al, 1999) and parity (Lahmann et al, 2000). These studies, however, have not taken simultaneously into account earlier lifecourse variables, for example, body size at different ages.…”