You're More Likely To Have Diabetes If Your Parents Ate Badly

Despite your best efforts, you're not eating enough kale.

Instead, you're stuffing your face with pizza night after night and fueling your workday with a few cans of Coke. And what day would be complete without a pint of Ben & Jerry's?

If this sounds like you, first of all, I hope you know you have a bit of work to do on your diet. Secondly, the food you gravitate toward may have something to do with your parents' diets.

According to a new study conducted out of the German Research Center for Environmental Health, obesity and diabetes can be inherited epigenetically, meaning these diseases are passed on through traits that aren't entirely DNA-based, like diet.

For the study, researchers impregnated surrogate mice through IVF using isolated oocytes (eggs) and sperm from mice who became obese or developed diabetes due to high-fat diets.

The female offspring developed severe obesity, and the male baby mice showed high glucose levels, predisposing them to diabetes.

Martin Hrabe de Angelis, who initiated the study, told ScienceDaily,

This kind of epigenetic inheritance of a metabolic disorder due to an unhealthy diet could be another major cause for the dramatic global increase in the prevalence of diabetes since the 1960s.

Before you call your parents and let them know they completely destroyed your life, it's worth noting the foods you currently consume also play roles in your health, and those foods probably aren't great.

A study recently published in the scientific journal BMJ found super-processed foods make up a whopping 60 percent of our diets.

Yikes.

Let's get it together, America.

Citations: You are what your parents ate! (ScienceDaily)