A Scientist’s Quest Shows Taking on Chronic Disease Is a Tough Sell, but There’s Hope

Midway through the documentary “The One Hundred Year Effect,” it’s already clear Kent Thornburg, PhD, is not like most scientists. But then he utters a truth that seals the deal.

“I think we do a really terrible job of spreading our information to the public,” the retired professor from Oregon Health and Science University tells a group of advertising wizards, all recruited for his late in life quest. Thornburg wants to spread the word that the burden of chronic disease means the current generation of young adults will be the first to not outlive their parents.

But there’s good news, too. This is reversible.

Chronic disease could be halved in a generation, Thornburg says, if society could come to grips with the “industrial food” complex that has now overtaken a fourth generation, both in the US and around the world. Right now, too few physicians and policymakers understand this, much less the general public.

“I’m a very optimistic person,” he says. “I think we can turn this around.”

Thus, “The One Hundred Year Effect,” is both meta and message: it chronicles Thornburg’s attempts to use Hollywood pizzazz and advertising messaging—the same tools that created the junk food monolith—to sound the alarm: what’s happening to our health is not only dangerous to today’s population but has set off epigenetic effects that will harm generations to come.

The film premiered Friday, March 20, on the second annual National Future Generations Day, an observance conceived by Thornburg and Hollywood producer Bill Stuart, a former patient at OHSU who team up early in the film. Some of Stuart’s ideas don’t pan out—the efforts to cast someone to play Thornburg in a movie are highly amusing—but the problem becomes clear:

Chronic disease is a tough sell.

Since Thornburg has been at this for decades, he is not surprised. Nor is he deterred.

Retired since 2023 as the founding director for both the OHSU Center for Developmental Health and the Moore Institute for Nutrition & Wellness (the Bob and Charlee Moore Institute supported the documentary), Thornburg, at 81, acknowledges he could be spending his time on other pursuits, but this one is too important.

“I want you to know a little bit more about the urgency of the situation we're in now,” he tells the advertising team. “Approximately 60% of our population has one chronic disease already, and about 40% has two.

“These are going to start showing up at younger and younger ages. If we don't reverse the disease epidemic, more and more people will become ill with chronic diseases, and they will have to be cared for; we'll find that insurance schemes will be too expensive for people to have. This will become a national crisis, and this is something we can avoid.”

With colleague David Barker, MD PhD, who came to OHSU following groundbreaking work in the UK, Thornburgh integrated a range of disciplines to show how both nutrition deficits and stressors can affect infants and cause them to develop chronic disease later in life. The filmmakers interviewed Professor Caroline Fall, MBChB, DM, FRCP, FRCPCH, who worked with Barker in the UK to develop the dataset that first showed the connection between low birthweight and insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes later in life. (Barker died in 2013).

Where does “The One Hundred Year Effect” come in? As Thornburgh explains to Portland, Oregon, area comedienne Imani Denae and later, to local family folk performer Andy Furgeson, known as Red Yarn, each of them came from an egg created in their mothers, when their mothers were fetuses carried by their mothers. So, the nutritional chain of the young adults of childbearing age began almost 100 years ago with what their grandmothers ate as children. And Denae instantly latches on to the idea that her boyfriend’s chicken nuggets-and-ketchup diet isn’t cutting it.

Once she hears the science, Denae intuitively grasps the film’s point: the convenience foods developed and marketed over the past 70 years are wreaking havoc on our health, not only causing weight gain in the people who eat them but also chronic disease in the children and grandchildren born years later.

In a recent interview with The American Journal of Managed Care, Thornburgh said, “We’re now living in the third or fourth generation of people who have eaten mainly industrial food—and in the more recent decades, it's been ultraprocessed foods that have been the primary source of diet for a lot of people.” If most pregnant women are nourished by this type of food, this could explain the rising rates of colorectal cancer among young adults. “I wouldn't be surprised if that's a fact,” he said. “Our population is epigenetically vulnerable.”

The film’s first half presents this scientific foundation, while the second half offers hope: there’s the work of Tessa Roseboom, PhD, of the Netherlands (and an adjunct faculty member at Emory University), who has studied the Dutch Hunger Winter and is now developing interventions that can optimize improved health in the future. There is the youth movement Bite Back, whose members are shown engaging with the leaders of the food industry.

And there are the young people in the focus group that Stuart assembles to help him create National Future Generations Day. Their initial concerns are quite dark, but ultimately they see the day as a time for peers, “trying to get them to live in a future that they want to live in.”

Thornburg appreciates the messaging help. But he believes the real progress against chronic disease will come when communities take up the cause at the local level, and when children grow up learning about the connections between generations. So yes, it’s a setback when Kelsey Mueller Wendt, a city council member in Klamath Falls, Oregon, was the lone vote against a new supermarket that she felt was clustered near existing stores and left other rural areas with nowhere to shop.

But her opportunities to hear Thornburg’s message have made a difference, and she gives birth to a healthy baby boy, at 7 pounds, 5 ounces. Which according to David Barker’s studies, is a great weight for avoiding heart disease.

Denae tries out some of the new messaging in a comedy routine. She feels it falls flat. Furgeson has better luck composing a children’s song that introduces the “100 Year Effect” with birds laying eggs in a nest.

As Thornburg watches a roomful of children hearing the word “epigenetics” woven into the song, the scientist’s eyes well up.

There is hope.

For information about the film, click here.