Your old man can give you a lot of things: his hot temper, his big hairy feet, his old broken down Buick - but diabetes?
Apparently so, if you're a girl.
New research found male lab rats eating a fatty diet increases the risk of their female offspring developing diabetes.
Sounds like a bizarre form of mousy nepotism.
For the study, published in the journal Nature, scientists fed one group of male lab rats a fatty diet, and another group a normal diet. No surprise, the rats on the fatty diet became obese and diabetic.
Then they gave the rats a booty call, hooking the boys up with girl rats of normal weight. After 13 weeks, the female offspring of the obese and diabetic rats began showing symptoms of diabetes. Eek! I mean, squeak!
The researchers say the obese dad's sperm may be affected by their metabolic change, and is somehow being transferred into their offspring.
I bet it happens to humans too, but it's probably more nurture than nature.
Odds are if your dad sits down to a big breakfast of steak, eggs, bacon, and sausage every morning, and you grow up thinking there's nothing wrong with that, and regularly nosh your own lumberjack breakfast, you're probably going to run into some health problems later in life too.
My old man eats Cherrios with chocolate milk, sprinkled with sugar, luckily I missed that habit. Then again, I'm not a chick!.
Image credit: USA Today
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