What if famine doesn’t end when the food comes back?

I thought I knew what famine meant.

People starve. The crisis ends. Food returns. History moves on.

Then I found a study from rural Bangladesh.

Researchers looked at young adults who had been exposed to the 1974–75 famine before birth or in early childhood.

And decades later, they found differences in glucose, body-weight outcomes and metabolic markers depending on when that exposure happened. They also identified differences in specific DNA methylation markers.

And THAT sent me down another rabbit hole.

Because 1974 wasn’t the first time people from this region had lived through catastrophic hunger.

1866, the Orissa famine within the then Bengal Presidency.

Different famines. Different circumstances. Different populations and generations.

So I started wondering:

What happens when severe deprivation doesn’t happen once, but repeatedly across a region’s history?

And how much does the body keep the score?

Here is where the science matters.

The Bangladesh study does not prove that these famines created one inherited Bengali metabolic condition.

It does not prove famine is why Bengalis develop diabetes.

And it definitely does not prove that trauma simply gets written into our DNA and handed down unchanged.

What it does give us is something fascinating: evidence that famine exposure during early development was associated with measurable metabolic differences in a rural Bangladeshi cohort decades later. The researchers describe their findings as important proof-of-principle, while also noting the study’s small sample size and the need for larger studies.

Which leaves me with a much bigger question.

Maybe we shouldn’t only ask what famine did to history.

Maybe we should ask what famine did to people.

And what, if anything, people carried forward.

🐇🕳️

Sources and image credits

Primary health study

Finer, S., Iqbal, M. S., Lowe, R. et al. (2016). Is famine exposure during developmental life in rural Bangladesh associated with a metabolic and epigenetic signature in young adulthood? A historical cohort study. BMJ Open, 6, e011768. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011768.

The article is published under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Historical context

Klein, I. (2009). “The Famine of 1770.” In Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal. Cambridge University Press.

Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford University Press.

Sen, A. (1981). “Famine in Bangladesh.” In Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, pp. 131–153. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198284632.003.0009

Bose, S. (2015). Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Oxford University Press.

“Modern Bangladesh.” (2017). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.

Important geographical note

The 1866 famine is conventionally known as the Orissa Famine. Orissa was then administered within the Bengal Presidency; “Bengal Presidency, 1866” on the carousel refers to that colonial administrative geography, not to a claim that the famine affected Bengal in the same way as the Bengal famines of 1770 or 1943.

Archival image credits

1770 Bengal famine engraving: [Insert original artist/title, holding archive and licence]

1866 Orissa famine image: [Insert original photographer/artist, holding archive and licence]

1943 Bengal famine photograph: [Insert photographer, collection/archive, reference and licence]

1974–75 Bangladesh famine photograph: [Insert photographer, archive/publication, date and licence]

Rice-serving image: Original image created for @itsdilarakaan.

Study-paper image: Finer et al., BMJ Open (2016), CC BY-NC 4.0.

Research note

This post discusses population-level research and historical evidence. It is not a diagnosis or a claim that famine determines any individual’s health. Health outcomes are shaped by many interacting biological, social, environmental and healthcare factors.