![]() Perhaps more surprisingly, the children of men who endured the famine while in the womb were more likely to be obese.Ī 2014 study showed that sons (but not daughters) of fathers who began smoking before the age of 11, when they began to produce sperm, were fatter than those whose fathers started smoking later, after their sperm had already formed. The “Hunger Winter” studies in the Netherlands in 1944 showed that people conceived during a particularly brutal winter famine, when adults were eating 400 to 800 calories per day, were more likely to have heart disease as adults compared with those who were in the womb during more prosperous times. Other research in humans has suggested there’s something beyond our genes and environment that’s affecting our health, but the Civil War study is one of the first to study the effects of war specifically. For example, mice that have been taught to fear the smell of cherries when it was paired with an electric shock had children and grandchildren that also showed signs of anxiety when exposed to the odor, even though they had never “learned” the painful association. He thinks this study might help explain why states in the southern United States-which had more severe food shortages during and after the Civil War-have worse health outcomes today.Įpigenetic links have also been established in animal studies. The epigenome can affect lots of different cells, just as a software program can be run on many different computers. Jirtle explains the epigenome as a type of software that runs on the computer-like cell. “The stress on the system moves the machinery to put down or not put down epigenetic markers.” Jirtle, an epigenetics researcher at North Carolina State University who was not involved in the study. “It’s either the stress of war or the malnutrition of war or both,” said Randy L. These epigenetic changes are inherited by later generations, setting diseases in motion. Crowding was extreme-each man was said to have had a grave’s worth of square footage to himself-and deaths from diarrhea and scurvy were common.īecause the study authors controlled for other factors that might have influenced the sons’ longevity, like socioeconomic status and the quality of the parents’ marriages, they believe this effect on mortality is working through epigenetics, or the process by which genes are switched on and off. The effects on longevity showed up for the sons of men who were imprisoned in 18, when conditions in POW camps were especially bad. ![]() ![]() Read: Can a parent’s life experience change the genes a child inherits? In other words, it seemed like the stresses of war were getting passed down between generations. This is despite the fact that the sons were born after the war, so they couldn’t have experienced its horrors personally. They found that the sons of Union Army soldiers who endured grueling conditions as prisoners of war were more likely to die young than the sons of soldiers who were not prisoners. The most recent chapter is a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesthis week by researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research. “The Jews have nothing to do with it!” I always want to say in response, as though I’m debunking some George Soros–related conspiracy.īut a growing body of evidence suggests my therapist might be right and I’m wrong. I can, however, write the perfect email to get myself out of a scrape, or find a way to stop thinking about why I didn’t get some plaudit or another. At the same time, I can’t do anything about the fact that the Holocaust happened, so I don’t want to spend time thinking about its effects on my cortisol levels. I am, of course, grateful that my life is easier than the lives of my relatives-Jewish and otherwise-who survived World War II. Of course you’re anxious, she seems to say you’re Jewish! I think it’s meant to help me feel more at peace with my emotions, but I must admit I find this response deeply unsatisfying. “Well, like all Ashkenazi Jews, you have a lot of intergenerational trauma. ![]() Often when I complain to my therapist about how stressed out I am by a problem I’m having, she says a variation on the same thing:
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