Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked Read Online Free PDF

the midnight sun in summer and the northern lights in winter.
    Swedish researchers were drawn to Överkalix because careful historical records had been kept by town officials during the nineteenth century, when Överkalix was subject to repeated crop failures. Harvest statistics were collected in “Communications from the County Governor in Västerbotten to His Majesty the King,” and grain prices were recorded as well. Researchers had information on children born in Överkalix in 1905, as well as data on bountiful harvests and starvation back to the time of the children’s grandparents. The idea was to look for any connection between the grandparents’ diets and the outcomes of their grandchildren. During bountiful years, the grandparents would have had plenty to eat, and during lean years they would not have had nearly enough. The scientists didn’t know what they would find, but the data gave them the opportunity to see whether changes in men’s nutrition could have any health consequences for their grandchildren.
    They looked at records that would tell them about the diets of grandfathers during their early adolescent years, a period thought to be particularly important for future health. And they found that diet at that stage of life had important consequences. The grandchildren of men who had plenty to eat did not live as long as those whose grandfathers had gone hungry. The grandfathers’ hunger was good for grandchildren in other ways, too. The grandchildren of these men were less likely to die of heart disease or diabetes than those whose grandfathers had had plenty to eat as adolescents.
    Marcus Pembrey of University College London has reviewed the Överkalix findings and other sources of information to see what else he could learn about men’s behavior and diet and their effects on their children and grandchildren. He looked at data on 166 British fathers who said they’d started smoking before the age of eleven and compared their children to those of fathers who started smoking later in life. The sons of the fathers who started smoking early were more likely to be overweight by age nine. There seemed to be a link between fathers and their sons but not between fathers and their daughters.
    Pembrey and his colleagues also looked again at the historical records of harvests in Överkalix to determine which grandparents had good access to nutrition in early adolescence and which did not. They confirmed the increased mortality risk in the grandsons of paternal grandfathers who had good access to food. And they found the same thing in granddaughters whose paternal grandmothers had plenty to eat. The opposite case was also true: grandchildren had lower mortality risk if their paternal grandparents had poor access to food as children.
    There’s more. We have known that mothers who overeat or are obese during pregnancy increase the chances that their children will be obese. And now we know that a similar thing happens with fathers. The children of obese mothers and fathers are more likely to be obese themselves. This result comes from Margaret J. Morris and her colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Australia. They noticed that overweight children usually had overweight mothers and fathers, and they wondered whether fathers’ diets—not just their genes—would affect their children’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
    The researchers fed male rats of normal weight a diet of more than 40 percent fat, which made them obese. Then they mated them with females who had been fed a normal diet. The male pups showed increases in weight and body fat, and tests indicated they had an increased risk of diabetes. The daughters showed a different pattern. Their body fat and weight were normal when they were born, but in adulthood, they developed a diabetes-like condition marked by alterations in the way they handled glucose and insulin. When Morris and her team looked closely at the daughters’ genes, they