Our Health is Inherited — What is a Nutritional Legacy?

Research can be a fun adventure down intriguing new paths, or it can urge us to revisit dark and cob-webby places we may rather not go because we’re not sure where to place our next step.

Walk with me here for a moment. The “stretching” for me this week has to do with the types of legacies we inherit from our forebears. This certainly encompasses social and cultural understandings and reality (note: recent unsettling events in the U.S and the need for greater self-awareness and action on behalf of others different from ourselves). In terms of nutrition and health, certain genetic tendencies are passed on to us, and from us to our descendants.

In times of war-related food shortages or natural famine, people who went for long stretches without sufficient nutritive intake were two generations later found to have affected their grandchildren with a predisposition toward obesity and diabetes. A study of Scandinavian women experiencing a severe food shortage during their first trimester of pregnancy had daughters who also tended toward diabetes and obesity. Boys whose grandfathers grew up during the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s were more inclined to die prematurely from diabetic complications.

How do we explain what is happening in the body?

Inconsistent nutrient intake reduces a person’s natural response to blood glucose levels, changes appetite, the ability to burn calories, and how fat gets stored. In one animal study of bulls put on a 90-day starvation diet, researchers calculated 2,600 abnormal changes to their genes. The human studies mentioned above suggest that human genetic inclinations were manipulated by a period of under-nutrition – we just don’t have a count of how many specific changes took place. Hundreds? Thousands?

In our modern culture, the prevalence of "empty calories" – processed foods with little to no positive nutritional value – is epidemic. A recent estimate of the Standard American Diet (SAD) is that 60 percent of a typical American’s intake comes from empty calories in processed sweet and starchy foods that taste good and fill us up, but create a new kind of malnourishment.

The quality of the nutrients we eat are the fuel for our body’s functions at the cellular and genetic level. Within a week, a return to “traditional” eating habits (a focus on real whole foods including plants, grass-fed or pastured animal products and supportive, healthy fats) can affect a positive change in the way that genes behave. If sugar and processed, empty foods return, their “negative genetic expression” can return in as short as six hours. [See notes for these studies in The Craving Cure (2017), by Julia Ross, an addictions counselor.]

It’s all so amazing to me. And so powerful because we have a CHOICE.

To those of us with younger family members (or friends in our circle of influence), what will our nutritional legacy be?

photo credit: Generational legacy. By Hajninjah on Pixabay.com.