British Five-Year-Olds Up To 7cm Shorter Than Western Peers
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Times.
This is the sub-heading.
Poor diet and health service cuts blamed for ‘pretty startling’ trend
These are the first two paragraphs.
Five-year-olds in Britain are on average up to seven centimetres shorter than their peers in other wealthy nations, in a trend described as “pretty startling”.
A poor national diet has been highlighted as a major culprit in Britain’s fall down international rankings of child height.
I am coeliac and am only 170 cm.
During the pandemic, I did some statistical research on coeliac disease and the covids for my own interest.
I found a peer-reviewed Indian medical paper entitled Coeliac Disease: Can We Avert The Impending Epidemic In India? The author felt that modern high-gluten wheats, were increasing the rate of the disease.
The author also said this about introduction gluten to babies in Sweden.
The time of first exposure to wheat influences the development of celiac disease. In countries such as Finland, Estonia, and Denmark, characterized by low gluten consumption in infancy, celiac disease prevalence is much lower than in Sweden where gluten consumption is high in infancy. A natural experiment occurred in Sweden about two decades ago when national recommendations were made to introduce wheat into the diet after cessation of breast feeding at six months. This change was coupled with increased wheat gluten consumption through infant feeds. Together these measures resulted in a two-fold increase in incidence of celiac disease in Sweden, which was attributed to introduction of wheat into the diet after cessation of breast feeding. In 1996 this recommendation was changed to introduce gluten in gradually increasing amounts while the infant was still being breast fed. This led to a dramatic decrease in celiac disease incidence.
It is interesting to look at heights of five-year-olds given in the Times article for the four countries.
- Denmark – 117.4 – 118.1
- Estonia – 116.9 – 115.7
- Finland – 116.3 – 114.5
- Sweden – 115.1 – 115.1
Note that all heights are in centimetres, with boys first.
As according to the graphs in the article the UK and the US have shown the biggest declines in height, is gluten-rich junk food, the major cause of this decline?
More research needs to be done!
The Anonymous Widower 
Surely this is explained by Britain having a much higher percentage of children of Asian heritage than do any of the Scandinavian or Baltic countries. My father was 6ft 3in; I am the same. My wife and her family are PIO and all around 5ft-5ft 2in, as are most Indian-origin people of her generation in Mauritius. I only have to look out of my windows to see the reality of the ethnic variations in height and body type. There are exceptions – veteran Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, for example – but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. I don’t discount diet being a factor in some cases, but a lot more research and analysis, broken down into ethnicity and economic status, would be needed to make the theory stand up.
Comment by Stephen Spark | June 21, 2023 |
I suggest you find the paper and read it. It is a serious peer reviewed paper.
I very much feel we could improve the health of the UK population, if everybody was tested for coeliac disease at birth.
If my son, had been found to be coeliac at birth, there would have been a higher chance he wouldn’t have died at 37 from cancer.
Comment by AnonW | June 21, 2023 |
I agree, babies should be tested for coeliac disease, once they have had time to show the presence of the disease – so older, perhaps 8 months might be better. At birth they will not have had access to wheat.
Regarding the effect of coeliac disease on height, I am inclined to think about the genetic aspects (I know coeliac is also genetic). More and more diseases are found to be linked genetics, particularly “cousin marriages”. I know it is the norm in some areas of the world, by choice. But they also happened – and to some extent still do – in parts of the UK. Going back over some of my family history in Norfolk people from several villages almost always married someone from one of those villages. It doesn’t take many generations before most people are cousins to most of the other people, even though they probably don’t realise it. Two people marrying and having children together often will have a lot of the same recessive genes. PKU is the one which brought this up – it caused cretinism in children, until they did the research and found out why children had it and what caused it. My daughter’s best friend at school had it, diagnosed by a heel prick blood test at a few days old. It was close to the time that ALL children in UK got the heel prick test. Previous to that it had been only children in Norfolk who got the test; lots of children had the disease there. If it was diagnosed it could be controlled by removing the relevant proteins from the diet.
Hence, I think genetics places a big influence on the height of people as it does in so many other things.
Comment by nosnikrapzil | June 21, 2023 |
Years ago two brothers in my mother’s family married two sisters. Then one sister and one brother died. They weren’t married to each other, so the remaining brother and sister decided to live together. I am descended from one of their children.
Comment by AnonW | June 21, 2023 |
A single cousin marriage doesn’t usually cause major problems, and may cause none. Th problem is when a group of several hundred families intermarry over several generations – in some cases I have known of this happening for several hundred years. The incidence of serious birth defects, life threatening diseases and miscarriage due to Fatal Foetal Abnormalities in such populations is very very high. One example is the incidence of haemophilia in the European royal families – when spouses were selected for each other they were often blood relatives.
Comment by nosnikrapzil | June 22, 2023 |
Reduced stature due to poor diet is now very unlikely in the UK. This is more likely due to genetics (e.g. Scots are often quite short) and immigration either of people who are shorter for genetic reasons (e.g. Bengali) or did suffer childhood malnutrition in their original country before coming here.
Another factor might be artificial selection – only fit young men got to serve in fighting units in WWI and WW2 and about 1.2M died and more were maimed.
Comment by R. Mark Clayton | June 21, 2023 |