New research is providing worrying evidence that your grandparents’ exposure to toxic pollutants like DDT could increase the risk of illnesses for you and all your future offspring.
Michael Skinner, a biologist from Washington State University, studies how environmental toxicants, like DDT, affect epigenetic inheritance. That is the science of how changes to the way our DNA gets expressed can be transmitted to future generations.
He’s found the effects of DDT exposure can be passed down four generations in rodents, but said based on other studies with different animals, and with different toxic chemicals, the effects could be expected to last many more generations, and may, in fact, be permanent.
Given the effects he and other scientists have seen, Skinner said our current and ancestral exposures — to DDT and many other toxic synthetic chemicals we’ve been exposed to over the years — could be behind the rise in chronic diseases around the world today.