November 06, 2020

Anna Murray 

A new global analysis, led by researchers from the School of Public Health in Imperial College London, UK, has correlated the height and body-mass index (BMI) of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries and territories. The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, AstraZeneca Young Health Programme, European Union, "Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 193 countries and territories: a pooled analysis of 2181 population-based studies with 65 million participants" was published November 7 in the journal The Lancet.

Consequently, genetics has proven a small role in height and BMI at the population level relative to the nutrition and environment is revealed in the finding. According to the research, inadequate nutrition may have contributed to 19-year-olds in East Africa, Latin America, south and southeastern Asia being the shortest, while those in central and northwestern Europe were the tallest. The major contribution to this phenomenon is the lack of adequate and healthy nutrition and living environment in the school years.

Definitely, the study supports that both height and weight gain are closely linked to the quality of a child’s diet across the world. Poor nutrition in the school years may have set back a 20cm height gap. As the lead author of the study, Dr. Andrea Rodriguez Martinez urged global actions to enable children to grow taller with lifelong benefits for their health and wellbeing.

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