Could Grandpa’s Early Diet Affect Your Health?

A large study seeks to answer whether a man’s childhood diet has transgenerational repercussions.

Written byShawna Williams

| 4 min read

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Human nutrition research is notoriously fraught with difficulty. It gets even tougher when one wants to study the effect of a person’s diet on the health of future generations. Yet Stockholm University epidemiologist Denny Vågerö and his colleagues thought they could glean some insights by studying birth and death data from a cohort of people born in Uppsala, Sweden, early in the 20th century and their descendants. The team planned to combine information such as causes of death with estimates of the amount of food available during the childhoods of grandparents.

Doing that legwork would, the researchers hoped, enable them to test findings from another, much smaller Swedish cohort known as Överkalix that had attracted widespread attention by suggesting multigenerational effects of nutrition. Research on that dataset had shown that the amount of food a man had eaten between the ages of 9 and 12—the period ...

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Meet the Author

Shawna Williams
Shawna was an editor at The Scientist from 2017 through 2022. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Colorado College and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, she worked as a freelance editor and writer, and in the communications offices of several academic research institutions. As news director, Shawna assigned and edited news, opinion, and in-depth feature articles for the website on all aspects of the life sciences. She is based in central Washington State, and is a member of the Northwest Science Writers Association and the National Association of Science Writers.
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