Diet, height, and health

Height, health, and development.

Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where there are few other data. Understanding the determinants of height ...

Maternal diet in pregnancy and offspring height, sitting height, and leg length.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To examine the association between maternal diet in pregnancy and offspring height, sitting height, and leg length. DESIGN Cohort study. SETTING South west England. PARTICIPANTS 6663 singletons (51% male) enrolled in the Avon longitudinal study of parents and children, with information on their mother's diet in late pregnancy (obtained by food frequency questionnaire) and ...

Evolution, Diet and Health

The nutritional requirements of contemporary humans represent the end-result of dietary interactions between our ancestral species and their environments extending back to the origins of life on earth. Primates of modern aspect are thought to have emerged about 50 million years ago and appreciating the basic range of primate nutritional patterns over this lengthy evolutionary period is critical...

Height, frailty, and the standard of living: modelling the effects of diet and disease on declining mortality and increasing height.

Explanations of historical trends in both mortality and human height differ over the relative contributions of better nutrition and reduced exposure to disease. This paper explores theoretical models in which interactions between diet and disease determine both mortality and height. One model assumes that adult height is directly related to frailty, the relative risk of dying. The second model ...

Diet in Health and Disease