I don’t know how much Demeke Mekonen weighs but he looks obese to me with a protruding tummy, double chin and folded back-neck as well. Obviously, nothing wrong with that, if that is his choice of life style. Few days ago, he was in Afar to inspect the meager food aid flowing to Tigray. Not so much to encourage more aid flow but to leave out some including high energy foods that was meant to reach Tigrean pregnant mothers, starving newly born babies and children as well.
Consider this: Farmers who live on subsistence farming would put aside stocks of raw foods come rainy season. And people invariably put money aside in savings should means of income dry up in the future—contingency plans if you will. This type of strategic planning is not only limited to the above stated instances where the genes in our cells do economize and hoard energy as well in a bid to preserve life in an event the body gets exposed to a protracted starvation. And the particular gene is aptly dubbed “Thrifty Gene.”
Certainly, genes are not like microchips designed by clever hands, rather, they are the product of trial and error that had evolved where those which fail to adopt are selected against and those “fittest” are selected for and pass on to the next generation. And the “thrifty gene” is the product of evolutionary adaptation.
The question is, what does the thrifty gene do when it is exposed to a protracted and uninterrupted energy or food supply? That’s where it gets interesting. The Micronesian Islanders of Nauru in the Pacific and the Native American Pima have one of the highest incidence of diabetes in the world. The case of Nauru, a population of about 5000 is particularly well known. In the 1940s, it’s rich phosphate reserves attracted American mining companies and as a result, the people grew wealthy, their diet changed as it was mostly imported from the West and literally consumed high energy diet. The cases of type 2 Diabetes skyrocketed as it was nonexistent prior to the arrival of the American companies which brought with them Westernized diet. And the Diabetes reached epidemic proportion in the 1950s. By the late 1980s, half the adult population had diabetes. [Taken from the book by Nick Lane, “Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World.]
Nick Lane goes on to give the reason for the hike in Diabetes among the Nauru when he wrote, .”…They [the Nauru] are said to have the ‘thrifty’ genotype. They are genetically geared to hoard energy during times of plenty, and they use these big energy reserves to help them survive extended bouts of starvation or hardship…..unfortunately, the thrifty genetic make-up is counterproductive when the times of plenty are sustained continuously…..resistance to insulin is one of the central features of the thrifty genotype, essentially that is what diabetes is—resisting insulin…”
In another time and in a different part of the world, the long term effect of starvation particularly on fetuses and children was observed in a landmark prospective cohort study where the findings were somehow puzzling to the extent were controversial as well. During World War II, on 17 September 1944 to be specific, British paratroopers occupied the Dutch city of Arnhem to capture a strategic bridge over the Rhine. Eight days later, the Germans forced them to surrender, having fought off the ground forces sent to their relief. The Dutch railroad workers had called a strike to try to prevent German reinforcement from reaching Arnhem. In retaliation, the Germans ordered an embargo on all civilian transport in the country. The result was a devastating famine, which lasted for seven months where 10,000 people starved to death. It is called the Hunger Winter. [It is taken from Matt Ridley book, “The Agile Gene.”]
A harsh winter and a cruel embargo imposed by the Nazis combined to cause the Dutch famine where at some point the population was trying to survive on only about 30 percent of the normal daily calorie intake. Nessa Carey, in her book, “The Epigenetics Revolution” paints a grim picture where it hits home when she said, “…people ate grass and tulip bulbs, and burned every scrap furniture they could get their hands on, in a desperate effort to stay alive. Over 20,000 people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945….”
She went on to illustrate the long term effect of the dreadful famine when she writes, “…The dreadful privations of this time also created a remarkable scientific study population. The Dutch survivors were a well defined group of individuals all of whom suffered just one period of malnutrition, all of them at exactly the same time……Epidemiologists have been able to follow the long term effects of the famine and one of the first aspects they studied was the effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during the terrible 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 for the first three months of the pregnancy only but then well-fed, she was likely to have a baby with normal baby with a normal body weight…”
She went on to write that, epidemiologists were able to study these two groups for decades where the results were rather surprising. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. For forty or more years, these people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. Why not? How did these early life experiences affect these individuals for decades? Why weren’t these people able to go back to normal, once their environment reverted to how it should be? She queries.
In the second group whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy, the results were even more puzzling. They had higher rates of obesity than normal and greater incidence of mental illnesses, even though these individuals were healthy at birth, as she put it, “…something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them later in life decades after…..events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage where the fetus is really small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life….” She attributes the reason for her inquiry and the possible answer to it to something that has gained more attention in recent years called, “Epigenetics.” But that is not our interest here for it will take us far off afield.
In light of the above illuminating but poignant findings of a long term or prospective cohort study, one can only imagine the effect of the siege on Tigrean pregnant women and their fetuses including the starving children. The crimes of Abiy Ahmed and the sycophants around him is not only limited to genocide but the dire ramification of the siege where the unborn babies and starving children will have to suffer as they struggle with dire health and societal issues where it will be a challenging burden on Tigray as Tigray tries to provide them with all the care they deserve albeit with meager resources. As MLK put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”