Although all participants in our study were living with overweight or obesity, our findings that the BDNF polymorphism could not differentiate carriers of Val vs. Met variants on BMI is consistent with studies that included youth with and without obesity from Spain (Arija et al., 2010), Mexico (León-Mimila et al., 2013) and Serbia (Vidovic et al., 2020). Here, BDNF is linked to obesity due to melanocortin 4 receptor deficiency.