For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the surprising impact of ancestral behaviors on modern health.
The bad habits of our forefathers can weigh heavily on us. That’s one of the surprising conclusions of a groundbreaking demonstration of the transgenerational effects of environmental exposures on humans. Researchers in Bristol, UK have shown that smoking before puberty is associated with excess body fat for the smokers’ granddaughters and great-granddaughters, even if those in the intervening generations did not smoke as children. The findings, produced in part with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, were published January 21 in Nature Scientific Reports, using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which has tracked over 14,000 participants since the early 1990s.
A previous smoking study from the ALSPAC cohort found that sons of fathers who started smoking before puberty were heavier on average during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. The latest study looked back further, finding that if a paternal grandfather had started smoking pre-puberty, compared with later, his granddaughters (but not grandsons) had extra body fat at age 17 and even more at age 24. A generation later, the results were even greater, with great-granddaughters averaging more than six extra kilograms of body fat by age 24.