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Daily Discussion Thread: Mon 07 Aug 2023
(aussie.zone)
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I wonder if some of it is just genetics though. Even going back centuries there have always been people who were heavier. I think of poor Mama Cass.
all my grandparents were thin/normal. My parent's generation and the generation after that are fat. Could be that my parents grew up in a war induced famine. That messes you up .
And starvation messes up the next generation too. There was some research done a while back comparing obesity levels over several generations - I forget the name of the institution that sponsored it but it was something like Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge. A respectable one. They based their research on the Dutch famine during the closing stages of WW2. Where a huge cohort of people starved almost to death in Amsterdam. One of the findings was that the famine victims' subsequent offspring had a much higher level of morbid obesity and sub-morbid obesity than the offspring of other towns/regions in the area who had a limited diet but didn't actually starve. And also much higher than children produced before the famine. Like, their children's bodies got re-set to "pile on the fat just in case this happens again" status. Irrespective of diet. The third and fourth generation of descendants are currently being periodically monitored to see if 'normal' weight recurs or the re-set to obese persists further down the generations. Don't know the results for that bit but it's probably available online somewhere.
I understand Audrey Hepburn was one of the famine victims - lived through it as a teenager.
Yes, she'd wanted to be a ballerina but due to the starvation she went through and its effects on her body, even after, she was deemed not strong enough to continue.
This was the famine my parents lived thru. Many cities were blockaded by the nazis, some cities worse than others.