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Overweight grandsons and grandfathers’ starvation exposure

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View the page of Dora Costa

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Dora Costa discusses obesity in adult grandsons of grandfathers who experienced famine during development, particularly in developing countries with historical malnutrition.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 11, 2024

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This video video discusses research focused on the impact of fathers' status as prisoners of war (XPOW) during the U.S. Civil War on their children's and grandchildren's longevity and health. The speaker initially believed there would be a correlation between fathers' XPOW status, their socioeconomic status, and the longevity of their children. However, the findings indicated that only male offspring showed reduced longevity (about a year), while there was no relationship between the fathers’ XPOW status and their children's socioeconomic status.

The research hypothesized that the effects observed could be attributed to epigenetics—environmentally driven changes in gene function. The speaker also discussed transgenerational studies of human populations, particularly analyzing the effects of food shocks on longevity outcomes, highlighting studies from Sweden and the German famine during World War I. These studies indicated that conditions of overfeeding or underfeeding in grandfathers had varying impacts on their descendants.

Among the key findings, it was noted that male grandsons of XPOWs who experienced harsh conditions had a higher risk of overweight and poor health outcomes, while no such effects were observed in granddaughters. The research ruled out socioeconomic factors and psychological distress as explanations for the health outcomes. The effects appeared linked to nutrition and food availability during critical growth periods, particularly in the womb and during early childhood.

Overall, the study underscored the importance of considering ancestral conditions on the health of future generations and suggested that improved nutrition and living conditions could potentially mitigate the adverse effects of past hardships.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Well, let me begin by talking a little bit about,

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how I got interested in this topic.

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One of the things which I was looking at was

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what was the association between fathers

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XPOW status in the US Civil War

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and their children's longevity?

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Men imprisoned when conditions were at their harshest were

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reduced to walking skeletons,

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and I was convinced that there would be a relationship

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between, father's XPOW status

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and their children's longevity,

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and that it would all be operating

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through socioeconomic status.

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Much to my surprise, though, I found that only sons,

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not daughters were shorter lived.

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I also found no relationship

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between the father's XPOW status

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and the children's socioeconomic status.

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So try as I might, it's, I couldn't find anything

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about socioeconomic status.

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So what I ended up hypothesizing is

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that the explanation was most likely due to epigenetics.

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That is sort of an environmentally driven

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change in gene function.

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So next logical step was to examine the grandchildren.

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And here what I was able to do was

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to look at the longevity of granddaughters and grandsons

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and also the overweight of grandsons obesity, sort

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of a little bit less so

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because most people in the past simply weren't obese,

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they're just not enough of them.

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And overweight is when can think of it as a marker.

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It's not just of excess food consumption,

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but also it's some, it's a marker of coronary heart disease,

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stroke type two diabetes and also some cancers.

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So the idea is

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that you could have this environmentally driven change in

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gene function that would affect your disease risk

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and it would also show up in overweight.

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And here a possibility is that your descendants are being

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primed sort of for some bad conditions,

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which then never materialize later on.

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There are a lot of animal studies

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and also plant studies, which provide proof of concept

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of transgenerational transmission

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through epigenetic imprinting when can follow worms

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for 24 generations,

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and they're cheap to follow up sort of

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that many generations.

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But I've never been that interested in, rodents

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or in worms, et cetera.

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I'm a social scientist. I'm interested in people.

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There three sets, basically of

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transgenerational studies

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of human populations which have examined grandchildren's

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outcomes and grandparents food shock.

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And these studies have focused on

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the vulnerable slow growth period just before puberty.

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So the original set

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of studies looked at the very tiny parish

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of U calyx in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle.

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They're completely cut off in winter from any types

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of food supplies you just couldn't get up there.

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Then there's the Sula MultiGen study,

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which also looked at Sweden,

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but which focus sort of, mainly on sula

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and sort of the surrounding areas which fed into Sah.

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And there's one study which looked at the World War I

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German famine.

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And what the study sort of found is that overfeeding,

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so good harvests of, grandfathers led

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to worse later life, longevity disease

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and mental health outcomes among male line grandsons.

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And they found

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that underfeeding actually produced better outcomes.

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However, in Uve calyx, the underfeeding

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of paternal grandfathers around age 19

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reduced longevity of their grandsons.

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So here we've got sort

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of an effect going in the opposite direction.

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And among granddaughters in u Calyx,

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it was the change in their paternal

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grandmother's harvest conditions.

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So going from a good to bad

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or a bad to good harvest, which was, bad

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for later outcomes.

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And I think I also should mention the Dutch hunger winter

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studies because they looked at in utter exposures.

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And these studies actually find evidence of DNA methylation,

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which is suggestive of epigenetic factors at work.

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And these studies also found that there's overweight

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and obesity among those who were in the womb

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during the Dutch hunger winter.

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And also this is passed on to their descendants.

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So let's go back to the original resets of studies.

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So we know that sperm changes in response to diets,

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researchers stuff undergraduates full of sugar

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and they see what happens to sperm.

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So this is not, we don't know

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what the long-term effects are,

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but it's certainly possible

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that there could be some permanent changes

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to the male reproductive tract

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and non-coding RNA could be part of this process.

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Nonetheless, sort of a lot

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of these studies are kind of puzzling.

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So are good ancestral conditions actually bad for you

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and maybe they're bad for you before puberty,

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but not in the late growing years before adulthood?

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Or is it maybe just this change in ancestral

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conditions, which is

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Bad for you?

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And I think the other big question is how does

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what happens in the womb mediate some of these effects?

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So there's act, there's some nice studies done

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with mice which actually show that one can reverse some

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of these epigenetic effects with good

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nutrition in the womb.

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What I need to start talking about, first of all,

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I think is the US Civil War situation and what it was like.

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So war broke out in 1861,

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and you start to have large battles.

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No one knows what to do with the prisoners.

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So the two sides initially just have prisoner exchanges,

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but the system then breaks down in mid 1863.

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So there's the emancipation proclamation

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and the response of, the president's of the Confederacy,

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Jefferson Davis, was to say that look, all

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of the formerly enslaved men who were captured

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as Union army soldiers

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and their white officers could be turned over to the states.

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And in the states leading a slave insurrection

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was a hanging fence.

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And also the black soldiers could be re enslaved.

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So in approximately three quarters of all black men,

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whoever served, had been formerly enslaved.

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So exchanges grind to, to a complete halt.

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And the sides spent a lot of time arguing over terms,

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prisoner exchanges don't start again

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until you have the release of sick

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and wounded men in late 1864.

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And then more widespread exchanges in early 1865.

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And you can see what happens, sort

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of just this complete breakdown in conditions for the

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POWs when this exchange system stops.

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So for men captured

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after mid 1863, they're facing sort

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of just much more time in captivity.

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And they're also facing just in crowing, growingly,

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increasingly horrific conditions as you have the number

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of prisoners increase.

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So in one of the most notorious POW camps,

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Andersonville in the south, it's

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it was basically at one point the fifth

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largest city in the south.

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And an historian has estimated

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that each man had about the square footage of a grave.

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So extreme crowding.

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And this is before people understood sort of,

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anything to do with public health.

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So death rates, they're officially attributed to scurvy,

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to diarrhea and to dysentery.

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Death rates are just rising.

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And this is when men become sort of living skeletons.

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And in this time period, it's, we're talking about sort

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of a very different population.

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So it's, men were still growing until they were

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about age 25.

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And if you look at the men who were imprisoned

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during this time period when they were older,

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they definitely were stunted in terms of their heights

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by this experience.

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I can't measure psychosocial stress,

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but I'm going to assume that that too was present.

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So the methodology is pretty simple.

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It's, just compare the, descendants of veterans

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who were X POWs when, the exchange system broke down

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with the descendants of veterans who were X

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POWs when there was an exchange system,

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and also the descendants of non POWs.

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And one way

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that we can think about this is the treatment effect is

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having been, or grandfather was sort

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of a p oow when times were at their worst.

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Non POWs are the control group

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and sort of this period of,

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when the exchange system was in place.

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That's sort of this a little bit of a mixture.

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So think of them as partially treated.

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And I think one other thing which

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I probably should also mention is

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some ages might be more critical

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for transgenerational transmission than others.

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So, and here I think it's gonna be broadly it's a

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we're men growing or not.

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So it's gonna be say, they're below the age of 25.

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And I'm able to look at this

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because the age distribution

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of Union Army soldiers was quite broad.

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This is sort of a, this is not like a modern war.

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You have fathers who are fighting alongside their sons.

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So what I can do is see getting, so I can observe,

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was there sort of this multi-generational transmission

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of this, shock

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of having been a POW across generations.

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Getting at mechanisms is gonna be much harder.

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So I'm gonna have to rely on a proof by elimination,

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and I can rule out sort of a, some mechanisms such

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as a socioeconomic explanation.

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I cannot rule out an epigenetic explanation.

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Let me actually say something a little bit about the data

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because I need to find people in historical records.

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And this is much always much easier sort

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of said than it's actually done.

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There were no ID numbers back then soldiers did not

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have serial numbers.

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There were no social security numbers.

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And you, what you need to do is just create clear ones,

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this full genealogical family tree in order

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to identify people.

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So it's a very labor intensive task.

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And one of the nice things about the data set is

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that at least sort of for longevity, I can follow both

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grandsons and granddaughters in roughly equal numbers

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for heightened weight.

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I only have information on grandsons, and this is

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because it's,

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when do you get information on heightened weight?

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It tends to be for military records.

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And here I got lucky

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because World War II led

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to various draft registrations including this old man's

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draft, which was done for manpower purposes

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and which covered men age 45 to 64.

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So I have heightened weight information for almost all

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of the grandsons in my sample.

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There are a couple of results.

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So let me just start with, the main one.

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So it's first of all, male line grandsons,

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assuming they survived to age 45, they lost roughly a year

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of life or about 4% remaining life expectancies.

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If their grandfathers had the really horrific POW experi

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experience compared to those where the grandfathers were non

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POWs, there no differences in longevity

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by XPOW status among female line grandsons.

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And, they're none among the granddaughters.

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So all of this is going through the male line,

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and you observe this in overweight as well.

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So male line grandsons faced a 21%

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increase in overweight comp if,

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their grandfathers had the horrific POW experience compared

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to male line grandsons of non POWs.

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And, if you look at female line grandsons,

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they're no differences there.

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How much does overweight matter for death?

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Well, overweight accounts for maybe 14%

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of their excess risk of death.

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So this is an effect that's operating kind of both

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through overweight but also through longevity.

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And not all of the longevity effects

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are gonna be captured by overweight.

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Now, I think sort of the second point I want to stress, it's

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that there's absolutely no relationship between

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what happened to granddad when he was

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a POW or whether he was a POW

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and the grandchildren's socioeconomic status.

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So we can rule out socioeconomic status,

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and I do have detailed information sort of from linking

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to various census records about

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what was the socioeconomic status of the family.

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The third thing I want to emphasize is that there's no

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evidence of any type of psychological

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or extreme psychological distress among POW camp survivors.

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There's no excess in terms

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of suicide rates or anything like that.

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There's, we don't observe anything excess in terms of causes

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of death, which could plausibly related to high risk factors

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or to alcohol.

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There's no evidence sort of, of, any type of excess

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alcohol consumption.

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This could be a function of the time period

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and the specific war that we're looking at.

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These were men who consider themselves to be the saviors

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of their union through their suffering.

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They'd washed the sin of slavery from the land.

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So it's, there was sort of some meaning

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to their experience.

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Now that said,

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there could be maybe less extreme psychological distress,

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so maybe some

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of the psychological distress might manifest itself

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in overeating.

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And yes, if you look at X POWs,

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they were overweight relative to non POWs regardless

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of what age they happened to be when they were at risk

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of being a POW.

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So was it below age 25 or was it above age 25?

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Nonetheless, only those male line grandsons

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who were descendant from XP Ws, who were at risk

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of captivity before age 25 were

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overweight and shorter lived.

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So if there was some psychological effect,

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which is maybe leading to overweight among the men who were,

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captive above age 25,

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it's not showing up in their descendants at all.

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And I should point out that everyone here was,

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these are all children who were born after the war.

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There's a very small sample of, children

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who of cases where you have families

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where some children were born

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before the war, other children were born after the war.

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It looks as if there might be some sort of results there

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that these effects are only manifest in children born

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after the war, but the sample is just really small.

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The fourth thing I want to emphasize is that

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the worst possible case

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for the male line grandsons of ex POWs was

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to have been born in the winter to a father

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who was born in the winter.

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And this is actually one of the things that seems

17:53.085 --> 17:54.805
to be driving most of the results.

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So winter was,

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the toughest time food prices were at their highest,

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fresh fruits and vegetables were unavailable

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and vitamin levels were really low.

18:06.905 --> 18:09.685
So there does seem to be kind of this interaction

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between these, this multi-generational effect,

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which I'm finding maybe, let's call it an epigenetic effect.

18:17.995 --> 18:20.965
It's, even though my evidence is only circumstantial

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and what is happening in utter row,

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and it's particularly what's happening in the last,

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trimester of the pregnancy, which is maybe suggesting

18:32.555 --> 18:37.365
that it's, something is going wrong, sort of

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with a reprogramming here,

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I think clearly it's a multi-generational

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inheritance matters.

18:43.715 --> 18:47.005
It's, I think that's sort of one end.

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It matters in human populations.

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I think that's really one of the big takeaways.

18:52.705 --> 18:57.005
Now, I can't really tell whether the most harm was done

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by low levels of food

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or whether it's the most harm was done sort of by going

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from, good levels

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and soldiers tended to have good levels.

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You wanna keep your army well-nourished

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and they ended up going down to abysmal levels,

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but then they're going back up to good levels again.

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So is it preventing fluctuations

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or is it the poor levels themselves?

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So which one do you want to sort of control in order

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to have these effects potentially sort of,

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really good effects which compound across generations.

19:35.145 --> 19:39.115
So of course we want to avoid sort of,

19:39.165 --> 19:41.435
these episodes of really bad conditions,

19:41.575 --> 19:44.275
but we can't go back and undo the past.

19:45.105 --> 19:46.995
However, what we can try

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and do is reverse the effects of the past

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with good in utter conditions.

19:53.985 --> 19:56.965
So we want, while we obviously want to have good

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and utter conditions for everyone,

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this might be particularly important if we wanna target

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those individuals whose ancestors have had bad conditions.

00:00 - Well, let me begin by talking a little bit about, how I got interested in this topic. One of the things which I was looking at was what was the association between fathers XPOW status in the US Civil War and their children's longevity?

00:17 - Men imprisoned when conditions were at their harshest were reduced to walking skeletons, and I was convinced that there would be a relationship between, father's XPOW status and their children's longevity, and that it would all be operating through socioeconomic status. Much to my surprise, though, I found that only sons, not daughters were shorter lived. I also found no relationship

00:44 - between the father's XPOW status and the children's socioeconomic status. So try as I might, it's, I couldn't find anything about socioeconomic status. So what I ended up hypothesizing is that the explanation was most likely due to epigenetics. That is sort of an environmentally driven change in gene function. So next logical step was to examine the grandchildren. And here what I was able to do was

01:19 - to look at the longevity of granddaughters and grandsons and also the overweight of grandsons obesity, sort of a little bit less so because most people in the past simply weren't obese, they're just not enough of them. And overweight is when can think of it as a marker. It's not just of excess food consumption, but also it's some, it's a marker of coronary heart disease, stroke type two diabetes and also some cancers. So the idea is

01:52 - that you could have this environmentally driven change in gene function that would affect your disease risk and it would also show up in overweight. And here a possibility is that your descendants are being primed sort of for some bad conditions, which then never materialize later on. There are a lot of animal studies and also plant studies, which provide proof of concept of transgenerational transmission through epigenetic imprinting when can follow worms

02:27 - for 24 generations, and they're cheap to follow up sort of that many generations. But I've never been that interested in, rodents or in worms, et cetera. I'm a social scientist. I'm interested in people. There three sets, basically of transgenerational studies of human populations which have examined grandchildren's outcomes and grandparents food shock.

02:56 - And these studies have focused on the vulnerable slow growth period just before puberty. So the original set of studies looked at the very tiny parish of U calyx in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. They're completely cut off in winter from any types of food supplies you just couldn't get up there. Then there's the Sula MultiGen study, which also looked at Sweden, but which focus sort of, mainly on sula

03:33 - and sort of the surrounding areas which fed into Sah. And there's one study which looked at the World War I German famine. And what the study sort of found is that overfeeding, so good harvests of, grandfathers led to worse later life, longevity disease and mental health outcomes among male line grandsons. And they found that underfeeding actually produced better outcomes. However, in Uve calyx, the underfeeding

04:09 - of paternal grandfathers around age 19 reduced longevity of their grandsons. So here we've got sort of an effect going in the opposite direction. And among granddaughters in u Calyx, it was the change in their paternal grandmother's harvest conditions. So going from a good to bad or a bad to good harvest, which was, bad for later outcomes.

04:37 - And I think I also should mention the Dutch hunger winter studies because they looked at in utter exposures. And these studies actually find evidence of DNA methylation, which is suggestive of epigenetic factors at work. And these studies also found that there's overweight and obesity among those who were in the womb during the Dutch hunger winter. And also this is passed on to their descendants. So let's go back to the original resets of studies. So we know that sperm changes in response to diets,

05:17 - researchers stuff undergraduates full of sugar and they see what happens to sperm. So this is not, we don't know what the long-term effects are, but it's certainly possible that there could be some permanent changes to the male reproductive tract and non-coding RNA could be part of this process. Nonetheless, sort of a lot of these studies are kind of puzzling.

05:41 - So are good ancestral conditions actually bad for you and maybe they're bad for you before puberty, but not in the late growing years before adulthood? Or is it maybe just this change in ancestral conditions, which is Bad for you? And I think the other big question is how does what happens in the womb mediate some of these effects? So there's act, there's some nice studies done with mice which actually show that one can reverse some

06:12 - of these epigenetic effects with good nutrition in the womb. What I need to start talking about, first of all, I think is the US Civil War situation and what it was like. So war broke out in 1861, and you start to have large battles. No one knows what to do with the prisoners. So the two sides initially just have prisoner exchanges, but the system then breaks down in mid 1863. So there's the emancipation proclamation

06:52 - and the response of, the president's of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was to say that look, all of the formerly enslaved men who were captured as Union army soldiers and their white officers could be turned over to the states. And in the states leading a slave insurrection was a hanging fence. And also the black soldiers could be re enslaved. So in approximately three quarters of all black men, whoever served, had been formerly enslaved.

07:26 - So exchanges grind to, to a complete halt. And the sides spent a lot of time arguing over terms, prisoner exchanges don't start again until you have the release of sick and wounded men in late 1864. And then more widespread exchanges in early 1865. And you can see what happens, sort of just this complete breakdown in conditions for the POWs when this exchange system stops. So for men captured

08:02 - after mid 1863, they're facing sort of just much more time in captivity. And they're also facing just in crowing, growingly, increasingly horrific conditions as you have the number of prisoners increase. So in one of the most notorious POW camps, Andersonville in the south, it's it was basically at one point the fifth largest city in the south. And an historian has estimated

08:31 - that each man had about the square footage of a grave. So extreme crowding. And this is before people understood sort of, anything to do with public health. So death rates, they're officially attributed to scurvy, to diarrhea and to dysentery. Death rates are just rising. And this is when men become sort of living skeletons. And in this time period, it's, we're talking about sort of a very different population.

09:03 - So it's, men were still growing until they were about age 25. And if you look at the men who were imprisoned during this time period when they were older, they definitely were stunted in terms of their heights by this experience. I can't measure psychosocial stress, but I'm going to assume that that too was present. So the methodology is pretty simple. It's, just compare the, descendants of veterans

09:38 - who were X POWs when, the exchange system broke down with the descendants of veterans who were X POWs when there was an exchange system, and also the descendants of non POWs. And one way that we can think about this is the treatment effect is having been, or grandfather was sort of a p oow when times were at their worst. Non POWs are the control group and sort of this period of,

10:11 - when the exchange system was in place. That's sort of this a little bit of a mixture. So think of them as partially treated. And I think one other thing which I probably should also mention is some ages might be more critical for transgenerational transmission than others. So, and here I think it's gonna be broadly it's a we're men growing or not. So it's gonna be say, they're below the age of 25.

10:41 - And I'm able to look at this because the age distribution of Union Army soldiers was quite broad. This is sort of a, this is not like a modern war. You have fathers who are fighting alongside their sons. So what I can do is see getting, so I can observe, was there sort of this multi-generational transmission of this, shock of having been a POW across generations. Getting at mechanisms is gonna be much harder.

11:15 - So I'm gonna have to rely on a proof by elimination, and I can rule out sort of a, some mechanisms such as a socioeconomic explanation. I cannot rule out an epigenetic explanation. Let me actually say something a little bit about the data because I need to find people in historical records. And this is much always much easier sort of said than it's actually done. There were no ID numbers back then soldiers did not have serial numbers.

11:48 - There were no social security numbers. And you, what you need to do is just create clear ones, this full genealogical family tree in order to identify people. So it's a very labor intensive task. And one of the nice things about the data set is that at least sort of for longevity, I can follow both grandsons and granddaughters in roughly equal numbers for heightened weight. I only have information on grandsons, and this is

12:21 - because it's, when do you get information on heightened weight? It tends to be for military records. And here I got lucky because World War II led to various draft registrations including this old man's draft, which was done for manpower purposes and which covered men age 45 to 64. So I have heightened weight information for almost all of the grandsons in my sample.

12:49 - There are a couple of results. So let me just start with, the main one. So it's first of all, male line grandsons, assuming they survived to age 45, they lost roughly a year of life or about 4% remaining life expectancies. If their grandfathers had the really horrific POW experi experience compared to those where the grandfathers were non POWs, there no differences in longevity by XPOW status among female line grandsons. And, they're none among the granddaughters.

13:32 - So all of this is going through the male line, and you observe this in overweight as well. So male line grandsons faced a 21% increase in overweight comp if, their grandfathers had the horrific POW experience compared to male line grandsons of non POWs. And, if you look at female line grandsons, they're no differences there. How much does overweight matter for death? Well, overweight accounts for maybe 14%

14:11 - of their excess risk of death. So this is an effect that's operating kind of both through overweight but also through longevity. And not all of the longevity effects are gonna be captured by overweight. Now, I think sort of the second point I want to stress, it's that there's absolutely no relationship between what happened to granddad when he was a POW or whether he was a POW and the grandchildren's socioeconomic status.

14:48 - So we can rule out socioeconomic status, and I do have detailed information sort of from linking to various census records about what was the socioeconomic status of the family. The third thing I want to emphasize is that there's no evidence of any type of psychological or extreme psychological distress among POW camp survivors. There's no excess in terms of suicide rates or anything like that. There's, we don't observe anything excess in terms of causes

15:26 - of death, which could plausibly related to high risk factors or to alcohol. There's no evidence sort of, of, any type of excess alcohol consumption. This could be a function of the time period and the specific war that we're looking at. These were men who consider themselves to be the saviors of their union through their suffering. They'd washed the sin of slavery from the land. So it's, there was sort of some meaning

15:57 - to their experience. Now that said, there could be maybe less extreme psychological distress, so maybe some of the psychological distress might manifest itself in overeating. And yes, if you look at X POWs, they were overweight relative to non POWs regardless of what age they happened to be when they were at risk of being a POW.

16:26 - So was it below age 25 or was it above age 25? Nonetheless, only those male line grandsons who were descendant from XP Ws, who were at risk of captivity before age 25 were overweight and shorter lived. So if there was some psychological effect, which is maybe leading to overweight among the men who were, captive above age 25, it's not showing up in their descendants at all. And I should point out that everyone here was,

17:02 - these are all children who were born after the war. There's a very small sample of, children who of cases where you have families where some children were born before the war, other children were born after the war. It looks as if there might be some sort of results there that these effects are only manifest in children born after the war, but the sample is just really small. The fourth thing I want to emphasize is that the worst possible case

17:39 - for the male line grandsons of ex POWs was to have been born in the winter to a father who was born in the winter. And this is actually one of the things that seems to be driving most of the results. So winter was, the toughest time food prices were at their highest, fresh fruits and vegetables were unavailable and vitamin levels were really low. So there does seem to be kind of this interaction

18:09 - between these, this multi-generational effect, which I'm finding maybe, let's call it an epigenetic effect. It's, even though my evidence is only circumstantial and what is happening in utter row, and it's particularly what's happening in the last, trimester of the pregnancy, which is maybe suggesting that it's, something is going wrong, sort of with a reprogramming here, I think clearly it's a multi-generational inheritance matters.

18:43 - It's, I think that's sort of one end. It matters in human populations. I think that's really one of the big takeaways. Now, I can't really tell whether the most harm was done by low levels of food or whether it's the most harm was done sort of by going from, good levels and soldiers tended to have good levels. You wanna keep your army well-nourished and they ended up going down to abysmal levels,

19:12 - but then they're going back up to good levels again. So is it preventing fluctuations or is it the poor levels themselves? So which one do you want to sort of control in order to have these effects potentially sort of, really good effects which compound across generations. So of course we want to avoid sort of, these episodes of really bad conditions, but we can't go back and undo the past. However, what we can try

19:46 - and do is reverse the effects of the past with good in utter conditions. So we want, while we obviously want to have good and utter conditions for everyone, this might be particularly important if we wanna target those individuals whose ancestors have had bad conditions.

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