Stressful Life: Can you blame your parents and grandparents for your anxieties?

According to biologists, and this is a already well-supported theory - our parents and grandparents or even our great-great grandparents’ exposures to certain stressful events influence our health without mutating our DNAs.

This so-called epimutation was tested positive for plants, flies, worms, fish, rodents, and pigs, and likely to affect us, humans, although yet to proven. This multigenerational influence determines certain conditions we may suffer of, such as obesity. When we refer to an exposure, we are talking about a pollutant or a hormonal imbalance ignited by stress or any other environmental

factors, such as nutritional deficiencies (that affect or passed on to the embryo during pregnancy). What does this mean in real terms? Well, this suggests that we can be affected by our grandfathers’ fear conditioning to an unfamiliar odor (or smell), or their high-fat diet. The exposure to certain chemicals of our great-grandfathers may trigger ovarian diseases, higher anxiety, low testosterone count, and early puberty, while our great-great grandfathers’ may ‘bless’ us with obesity, prostate, or kidney diseases. In other words, it is conceivable that ancestral exposures increase our susceptibility to certain diseases. We have no control over what our relatives were exposed to in the past, but we certainly have control over what we do today, and how we deal with our weight problems or anxieties that likely impact our descendants for perhaps 4-5 generations down the line. I do not suggest getting comfortable about our issues and blaming our relatives. Absolutely not especially because such epimutation in a germ-line cell can also become protected from reprogramming of the epigenome, therefore the effects may skip a generation. Let’s be hopeful that it has! Further Reading: Scientific American August 2014 Edition: ‘A new kind of Inheritance’ Further Listening: http://youtu.be/k4LezkjNwnY