Dutch Hunger Winter

Stress damages us long before we are aware.

The Dutch Hunger Winter was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas to punish the reluctance of the Dutch to aid the Nazi war effort. Some 4.5 million were affected. It was one of those rare events to which psychologists pay attention to. It would be unethical to intentionally starve people for a long period of time, but since it happened naturally, it have psychologists the opportunity to perform a case study that helped us understand humans better, in the means of stress and its long-term effects. 

Because of excellent health care infrastructure and record keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long term effects of the famine. The Dutch survivors were a group of individuals all of whom suffered for the same exact period of time of malnutrition.

The first aspect studied was the effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that period.  "If a mother was well fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. If, on the other hand, the mother suffered malnutrition only for the first three months of the pregnancy (because the baby was conceived toward the end of the terrible episode), but then was well fed, she was likely to have abnormal-size baby."  Epi­demiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades, and what they found was really surprising.

The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, which showed in lower obesity rates and lower average weight of the people.  For forty or more years, those people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. More unexpectedly, the children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy had higher obesity rates than normal. Recent reports have shown a greater incidence of other health problems as well, including effects on certain measures of mental health. Even though those individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their devel­opment in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn't just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of gestation, a stage when the fetus is really very small and developing very rapidly, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.

Event the grandchildren of the women who were malnourished during the first three months of their pregnancy, seem to be affected. So something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children.

Epigenetics is the new discipline that is revolutionizing biol­ogy. Whenever two genetically identical individuals are nonidentical in some way we can measure, this is called epigenetics. When a change in environment has biological consequences that last long after the event itself has vanished into distant memory, we are seeing an epigenetic effect in action. And can take prime example in victims of the Hunger Winter. Their DNA didn’t change (mutate), and yet their life histories altered irrevocably in response to their environments.

Our bodies respond to famine like they do to other stressors. This leads to the conclusion that stress hormones in the mother’s blood, triggered a change in the nervous system of the fetus. The stress they went through even before their life began, left scars for the rest of their life. Not only with the way their body stores fat, but also with the way they respond to everyday stress. Many children were found to be highly susceptible to mental disorder, with higher risks for cardiovascular disease, and lowered immunity.