Real Whole Food is Even More Important for Our Kids
A Grandparent’s Diet Can Make Chronic Illness in Our Kids More Likely.
The food that we eat changes genes expression in the fetus and child. It is even more important to understand that the food parents and even grandparents ate changes gene expression in their children and grandchildren. This is the most fascinating and disruptive science of our time. It is the new frontier of medicine, and it challenges many things that we thought that we knew. For example, we thought that type 2 diabetes is a hereditary disease, but it is not a disease that is caused by a change in the DNA computer code in our genes which is a mutation. It is not inevitable that we will pass our type 2 diabetes to our kids. We can begin to reduce the risk of diabetes in our family tomorrow. That is because diabetes can be inherited, not because of mutations which take place over eons, but because of changes in gene regulation that can change over months or a few years. Changes in our own diet or that of our grandparents or parents can change gene expression and make us diabetic. Once gene expression changes, it may persist for at least two generations and those changes can also be inherited. The big difference is that mutations are permanent. Genetic changes in the DNA code are permanent. They do not respond to the environment. Epigenetic changes in gene regulation are not permanent. They can slowly change if your family moves to real whole food.
Overeating fast and processed food when you are a child or adolescent may increase your risk of having high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease your entire life. That is an especially sobering fact since two thirds of the calories American teens consume come from ultraprocessed food. The changes in gene expression caused by that early diet persist, and that is called metabolic memory. That is not the worst of it. A mother's own diet during her childhood may increase her child's risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and high blood pressure in adulthood. It also increases the risk of a wider range of chronic illnesses. A grandmother’s diet during her pregnancy changes the mother's gene expression in utero which in turn influences the grandchild's birth weight. Babies who are unusually small have the same increased risks for artery disease and diabetes. That means that our lifestyle choices impact us, but they also impact future generations. That underscores the importance of family food culture.
The best evidence for this comes out of Overkalix, Sweden and it goes back to 1800. Overkalix was a small isolated, poor community in the far north of Sweden during the study period. The main crops grown were wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, and turnips. Many crop harvests were poor and total crop failure was common. During a single five-year period, there were 4 total crop failures. The community was so isolated and poor that bringing food in from other places was not practical. Of course, when food was abundant, these poor people really made the most of it. If food was not readily available during the father's preteen period, then his children had a lower risk of dying of heart attack and stroke. If food was unusually abundant during the preteen years of a paternal grandfather’s life diabetes deaths in his grandchildren increased four-fold. There is a great NOVA episode, The Ghost in Your Genes, that reviews this topic in a more entertaining way. It explains in more detail how our lifestyle choices impact the health of our descendants. Your choices today can influence your family’s health for generations. This NOVA video was produced nearly twenty years ago. We are much further along today in understanding the implications of this new science. It is a new frontier that will dramatically improve our ability to live longer, healthier lives.
Ultraprocessed foods are especially damaging to our children because they are engineered to combine the perfect amount of salt, fat, sugar, processed carbohydrate and texture to maximize taste appeal and drive overconsumption that leads to weight gain. Many young people will eat these foods to the exclusion of everything else. There are children like that in my own family. These foods have been altered so that they are high in sodium, low in potassium, and have very little in the way of vitamins, minerals, micronutrients, and antioxidants. They are empty calories. That means that most of our teenagers are overfed and malnourished. It is bad enough that it affects them, but it is much worse than it will impact the health of their children and grandchildren. We will pay the price of these choices for generations to come. This is information that every person should know and it should be taught in our health classes in high school. Our kids are bombarded every single day by extremely effective ads promoting fast, and highly processed food. The reasons to eat more whole, real food just got a lot more powerful.