What Your Dad Ate Before You Were Even Conceived Affects Your Health Now

"You are what you eat" goes the old adage. But what in the hell is a person to do when it's not what you eat that you are, but what your cargo-jort wearing dad eats? Why, wallow in the despair, acquiesce to the bum cards you were given, and fill up a kiddie pool with Jimmy Buffet branded thousand island dressing, of course.

In a study that tested a radical hypothesis, scientists from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Matabolic Research have found that what your father ate before you were even conceived could affect your health. Their study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism this month.

This means you are not just a product of nature and nurture. You are also a product of your father's environment at and before your conception. And what he ate—including how much he weighed—may impact your eating behavior.

The hypothesis rounds against what you might have learned about genetics: that parents pass down their genes to their children. Period. Instead, it seems, parents pass down what happens to their genes too.

This disruptive study is a major milestone in the field of epigenetics. In one part of the study, researchers looked at the sperm of 12 men who had gastric bypass surgery at two different times: six before and one year after the surgery. They observed an average of 4,000 structural changes to the sperm cell DNA. In other words, the men's weight—and what they were eating—was changing the sperm.

"We certainly need to further examine the meaning of these differences; yet, this is early evidence that sperm carries information about a man's weight. And our results imply that weight loss in fathers may influence the eating behavior or their future children," says Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen Romain Barrès.

The group also compared sperm cells of 13 lean men to that of 10 obese men and found that the two groups had different epigenetic marks that could change the appetites of their offspring.

So, what the scientists have found is that you aren't simply a product of a sperm and an egg. Instead, external or environmental factors can switch genes on and off and affect how cells read genes. And all of this can make you who you are today.

Famine in our family's past? Not good—it can increase your risk of cardiometabolic diseases and diabetes.

The study actually identified epigenetic molecules called microRNA as the carriers in sperm that may be responsible for all of this. Even the scientists were surprised by what they found: "We did not expect to see such important changes in epigenetic information due to environmental pressure," says Barrès. "Discovering that lifestyle and environmental factors, such as a person's nutritional state, can shape the information in our gametes and thereby modify the eating behavior of the next generation is, to my mind, an important find."

"The study raises awareness about the importance of lifestyle factors, particularly our diet, prior to conception. The way we eat and our level of physical activity before we conceive may be important to our future children's health and development," says Soetkin Versteyhe, a co-author.

Oh well. Looks like it's time to accept reality for what it is and accept the inferior meat sack your pappy blessed you with. After all, it's what he did to you.