Your parents' lifestyles can determine your health—even as an adult

We don't choose our parents, their jobs or their health. And we don't have a say in whether or not they smoke, nor in what they ate when we were children. However, our recent study found that these things strongly determine our own lifestyles and health, even into adulthood. For our study – involving 21,000 participants aged 50 and above from 13 European countries – we compared the participants' current smoking, obesity and lack of exercise with their parents' job, longevity, smoking status and alcohol problems during the participants' childhoods. We showed that parents' characteristics when participants were ten years old explained between 31% and 78% of their adult health, with a European average at 50%. The countries where health was largely determined by parents' characteristics were Czech Republic (78%), Germany (72%), Spain (70%), France (66%) and Austria (64%). However, parental factors mattered less in Belgium (31%), the Netherlands (34%) and Switzerland (41%)