You're listening to Shortwave from MPR.

It was October of 1944.

World War II was almost over and the Allied forces were winning.

The Germans retaliated by blocking food supply to the Netherlands.

That year there was an unusually early and brutally cold winter.

The Netherlands were completely cut off of food.

People there were really, really starving.

It was an extreme famine to the point where you had...

That's Bianca Jones-Marlin.

She's a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

And that time in the Netherlands is now known as the Dutch Hunger Winter.

Thousands of people died and thousands more experienced intense starvation.

Now this was a really specific and well-documented moment in time,

which made it ripe for investigation. Researchers wanted to try and study the effects of hunger on development.

And they found that the children of people who were pregnant during the famine were more likely to have obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease,

and they had shorter life spans too.

But what's really surprising is that the grandchildren of people alive during the hunger winter

were more likely to have poor health too, meaning those a generation removed from the trauma.

Bianca and others are trying to figure out how and why.

I look at how trauma or stressors can be passed down through generations,

and not just how they're passed down through lore or word or storytelling,

but how they're passed down by being remembered in the cells in our body.

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