I try to eat moderately healthily, at least most of the time. I love fruit, and end up eating a lot of it when I can. My goal while at school was to eat some kind of protein, some kind of fresh food, and not live entirely off trail mix scarfed down in between classes. This can be depressingly hard when my schedule has a lot of labs, or while I'm taking physics.
Whenever I'm really stressed and having to use a lot of willpower to get through something, I'm much less cognizant about what I eat and much more likely to eat sweets or junk food. It also becomes harder when I'm really busy. I started packing trail mix the night before I went to classes because it was usually lunchtime before I could get to the Caf, and I started to get really tired and stressed. Some days it's just not possible until later in the day, and I'll end up grabbing whatever I can eat quickly before heading to Chem tutoring.
So eating less healthy food is primarily a matter of stress and convenience for me. But sometimes I do really just want to eat a Chick-fil-a sandwich, or popcorn, or a chocolate cherry oatmeal cookie (it's a fun recipe). I am admittedly a caffeine addict.
My family has a long tradition of feeding people. My family is from the South, and my grandparents lived in Africa as missionaries, where they fed a lot of people--food is part of hospitality for us, and we ate family dinner together through when I was in high school. We eat a lot of ethnic food and a lot of carbohydrates, but we also try to routinely eat fresh food and vegetables. I didn't inherit their palates to a great degree, but I did learn to like more of what they ate as I got older. This was especially true for spicy food. But mostly, we all like similar dishes. Most unfortunately, I also love baking. Not even eating the stuff so much as making it while listening to audiobooks--I miss our mixer and oven when I'm at school. Normally whatever I made would go to my Mom's classes, or neighbors, or my parents' small group, but for now, a lot of it is going in our freezer (darn social distancing). We do eat a lot of homemade less than healthy food, but we also tend to avoid food like chips and prepackaged sweets.
I think that if I have children, my habits will probably affect them more strongly than what bacteria I have developed now. But I am trying to eat healthily enough that I feel good and build good eating patterns. One thing I love that my family does is family dinner, which is correlated with a variety of positive academic and health outcomes. Children who have family dinner more than three times a week were less likely to have disordered eating habits or be overweight, and they were more likely to have healthy eating patterns (Hammons & Fiese 2011). Eating family dinner was also correlated with lower rates of substance abuse and both children and parents rated their relationships with each more highly when they had frequent family dinners (CASAColumbia 2012).
Even though I didn't always love family dinner (there were some stressful and tense nights), I'm grateful that my parents made that effort to share meals, and I want to do the same for my children.
CASAColumbia. (2012). The Importance of Family Dinners VIII. The Center on Addiction. https://www.centeronaddiction.org/addiction-research/reports/importance-of-family-dinners-2012
Hammons, A, & Fiese, B. H. (2011). Is Frequency of Shared Family Meals Related to the Nutritional Health of Children and Adolescents? Pediatrics. 127(6): e1565–e1574. doi: 10.1542/peds.2010-1440