Hunger is never the story of one generation. For many years and decades, hunger, transferred by the whole people, changes everything. First of all - food habits.
Mom picks up crumbs from the table and throws them into the mouth. Dad can not stop at the sight of a buffet, imposes a mountain of himself and gives it later, trying to achieve everything on a plate. Staff suffers, unable to throw out the remnants of the soup, and thinks of them somehow terrible on the species of casserole to eat it, with difficulty swallowing every piece. Always calm stepfather suddenly becomes shrieking and fusible, finding the evening that food in the refrigerator remained only for breakfast.
The child grows among these habits and does not know why he picks up the crumbs, comes out without much pleasure, sculpts from the pizza dumplings and cannot be transferred if there is no bread in the house. After all, the bread he, in general, is not particularly eating ...
But the consequences of hunger are not only about the broken mental generations. It turns out that hunger is imprinted in our body and the body of our children.
For several decades after the war, Dutch and British scientists, using the not very happy occasion, studied the influence on the body of the Dutch children who had hunger inside their mothers during the blockade. As it was possible to expect, they grow low people - much less than normal for the goalkeeper. In addition, they were susceptible to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
However, moreover, the effect was observed in children of those children.
In our time, scientists have conducted studies of the consequences of hunger on mice and found out ... that long serious malnutrition causes hereditary epigenetic changes. Which, like people, was expressed in the fact that the children sitting on the "diet" of mice were born and grew smaller than ordinary, and had a tendency to develop diabetes.
And these problems, as it turned out, is transmitted to future generations with males. Even if their partner became an absolutely healthy female, the probability of the birth of small sizes and the offspring prone to diabetes was incredibly large. That is, in the genome of grandchildren it was possible to track the memory of hunger, transferred to grandmothers.
However, scientists also found themselves and emphasized that this epigenetic effect could be a storm in further generations and is thus reversible for the population.
In the meantime, many people who were born in Russia at the end of the eighties are nineties, it is very difficult to achieve weight loss or permanent weight retention at one level. This resists their organism itself. And the sons and daughters born in the nineties will also be observed a similar problem. Alas.
Text author: Lilith Mazikina