Parents are believed to strongly influence the health behaviours of their offspring. It is also believed that parents are gatekeepers and function as important role model for the development of offspring health behaviours such as diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleeping. Diets has been considered as one of most important health behaviours that offspring adapt from parents throughout development stages of life including early childhood and adolescent period. In the life course epidemiology, diets has been considered as one of most important modifiable risk factors for the development of cardio-metabolic diseases. Most previous studies on the resemblance of parent-offspring dietary patterns were based on small sample and cross-sectional design. There is no study that considered (1) parent-offspring resemblance from early life to adulthood using repeated measures of parent-offspring diets; (2) whether this resemblance was influenced by other life style factors such as physical activity, sedentary behaviours, and sleeping (3) pathways of the resemblance of dietary trajectories predict the progression of offspring cardio-metabolic risks. Finally, (4) whether the genetic predisposition factors in parent-offspring dietary resemblance also contribute to the development of cardio-metabolic risk.

To our knowledge, this will be the first study to evaluate the parent-offspring dietary resemblance through a longitudinal cohort considering a range of other behavioural factors and genetic predisposition to the progression of cardio-metabolic risk factors throughout the life course. The Knowledge from this study will help to design effective family based early life intervention; identify appropriate target group, and period of intervention for healthy dietary habit as a prevention of later life chronic diseases.