The Hunger Winter with an obesity twist

In 1944, the Nazi army occupied Holland and restricted the food supply to the western part of that country, cutting the daily diet of its inhabitants to 750 calories a day or less. A typical day’s worth of food might consist of a couple of slices of bread, a turnip, and one or two small potatoes. About 20,000 people died before the Allied troops liberated the region in May 1945. (Audrey Hepburn was a survivor of that event. She was 16.)

Because of the clear beginning and ending dates as well as the excellent record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine (called the Hongerwinter.) Among other things, they looked at how starvation affects the outcome of pregnancy.

As you can imagine, a diet that provides only 450 to 750 calories per day is very hard on a developing fetus. All the infants were affected, but the effects differed, depending on when they were conceived relative to the starvation period. The point I’m making today supports my ongoing defense of fat people: Those children whose mothers had been malnourished early in pregnancy had higher obesity rates than normal. 

Something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them decades later. That effect, it is now understood, has to do with epigenetics: chemical modifications to our genetic material that change the way genes are switched on or off but don’t alter the genes themselves. In this case, to radically oversimplify, the “hold on to that fat” gene was switched on and stayed on. Not only that, the effect was passed on: the grandchildren of the malnourished women also have problems with obesity.

None of my children are obese or even overweight. Maybe it’s because I routinely gained 40 pounds with each one. I was the fat one.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.