Researchers have carried out the study and found that human cells have the ability to "remember" and could replicate the effects of a poor diet on the body for weeks, months, and even generations, to come.

Lead researcher Prof Assam El-Osta said: "We now know that chocolate bar you had this morning can have very acute effects, and those effects continue for up to two weeks later, this is what we refer to as the burden of memory.

"The changes initiated by diet create a kind of ghost that lives within our genes, and that these epigenetic changes remember the effects of glucose and continue to respond to them for days or even weeks."

In their study, Prof El-Osta of Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute and colleagues have shown very specific molecular events occur after the consumption of food high in glucose causing chemical changes to people's genetic controls.

These changes continue beyond the meal itself, and have the ability to alter natural metabolic responses to diet. And, a chemical change in the body initiated by a high-glucose diet can continue for up to weeks after exposure to the food.

In addition, the researchers found that cells which showed profound changes in a high-glucose environment actually continued to exhibit those changes even when taken out of that environment.

In fact, the cells demonstrated a "memory" of that high glucose event even when the same cells were returned to their previous state, they found in the study on human aortic tissue and in mice.

"Humans have only one genome and once the DNA sequence is written it doesn't really change nor can we really control it, but, we actually have thousands of epigenomes which we can control, and, these epigenetics changes means what we eat and how we live can alter how our genes behave.