Net nutrition, insolation, mortality, and the antebellum paradox

Biological Differences between Late 19th and Early 20th Century Urban and Rural Residence

Communities urbanize when the net benefits to urbanization exceed rural areas. Body mass, height, and weight are biological welfare measures that reflect the net difference between calories consumed and calories required for work and to withstand the physical environment. Individuals of African-decent had greater BMIs, heavier weights, and shorter statures. Urban farmers had lower BMIs, shorter statures, and lower weight than rural farmers. Over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, urban and rural BMIs, height, and weight were constant, and rural farmers had greater BMIs, taller statures, and heavier weights than urban farmers and workers in other occupations.

Biological Well-Being and Inequality in Canary Islands: Lanzarote (Cohorts 1886-1982)

Developments in anthropometric history in the Iberian Peninsula have been remarkable in recent decades. In contrast, we barely know about the behavior of insular population groups and infants' and adults' growth during the nutritional transition in the Canary Islands. This paper analyzes the height, weight and body mass index of military recruits (conscripts) in a rural municipality from the eastern Canaries during the economic modernization process throughout the 20th century. The case study (municipality of San Bartolomé (SB) in Lanzarote, the island closest to the African continent) uses anthropometric data of military recruits from 1907-2001 (cohorts from 1886 to 1982). The final sample is composed of 1921 recruits' records that were measured and weighed at the ages of 19-21 years old when adolescent growth had finished. The long-term anthropometric study is carried out using two approaches: a malnutrition and growth retardation approach and an inequality perspective. In the first one, we use the methodology recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) that is based on z-scores. In the second one, we implement several inequality dimensions such as the coefficient of variation (CV), percentiles and an analysis for height and BMI evolution by five socioeconomic categories. The data suggest that improvements in biological well-being were due to advances in nutrition since the 1960s. They show that infant nutrition is sensitively associated with economic growth and demographic and epidemiological changes.

Nutrition within the household: 18th through early 20th century female and male statures

When other measures for material conditions are scarce or unreliable, the use of height is now common to evaluate economic conditions during economic development. However, throughout US economic development, height data by gender have been slow to emerge. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, female and male statures remained constant. Agricultural workers had taller statures than workers in other occupations, and the female agricultural height premium was over twice that of males. For both females and males, individuals with fairer complexions were taller than their darker complexioned counterparts. Gender collectively had the greatest explanatory effect associated with stature, followed by age and nativity. Socioeconomic status and birth period had the smallest collective effects with stature.

The long-run heterogeneous effects of a cholera pandemic on stature: Evidence from industrializing Japan

The recent COVID-19 pandemic poses the general question on how infectious diseases can persistently affect human health. A growing body of literature has found a significant amount of evidence on the long-term adverse effects of infectious diseases, such as influenza, typhoid fever, and yellow fever. However, we must be careful about the fact that little is known about the long-term consequences of the acute diarrheal disease pandemic cholera - Vibrio cholerae bacillus - which still threatens the health of the population in many developing countries. To bridge this gap in the body of knowledge, we utilized unique census-based data on army height at age 20 in early 20th-century Japan, with a difference-in-differences estimation strategy using regional variation in the intensity of cholera pandemics. We found that early-life exposure to a cholera pandemic had heterogeneous stunting effects on the final height of men; the magnitude of the stunting effects increased as the intensity of exposure increased.