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Socioeconomic inequality and environmental factors have a direct effect on the size of people: the more poverty, the less children develop during their growth stage.
This is the main conclusion of a series of studies led by the University of Murcia, involving thirteen researchers from ten Spanish universities, and which have been published in a special issue of the journal Hospitable Nutrition.
These are works financed by the Seneca Foundation and the Ministry of Economy and Business.
These 19 investigations address different facets of the inequality of nutritional health and its conditioning since the end of the eighteenth century until 2015 and reveal very significant historical and present, such as that before the start of the Civil War the rich were three centimeters taller that the poor;
differences that increased during the war and especially during the postwar years, in the decade of the 40s. José Miguel Martínez Carrión, professor of Applied Economics at the University of Murcia and principal investigator of this project, explains that "between 1937 and 1947 the average height of the Spanish descended between an inch and a half and a half, depending on the place of residence, but in some areas the poverty situation persisted a decade more and the consequences of that true nutritional disaster were evident, especially in rural areas "
An example is given in the town of Hellín (Albacete), where the average height of its inhabitants began to fall in 1937 and failed to recover the same records that year until 1953.
The investigation works use as a main base the military records of the size of the waiters who did the military service from the end of the XVIII century until the year 2001, when the obligatory military service disappeared.
"Since then we can only use as a reference the national health surveys in which one of the questions asked is the height, we believe that serial records should be made in order to have data of the whole population, since it is demonstrated that the size is an indicator of the effect of inequalities in access to proper nutrition ", defends Martínez Carrión.
The researcher at the University of Murcia is convinced that these serial data would allow to know precisely the effect that the economic crisis experienced since 2008 has had on the growth of children and adolescents due to the strong impact that many families have suffered.
Martínez Carrión also points out that in recent decades "the convergence between regions has been the trend, but if you go down to study small populations, inequalities between poor and rich neighborhoods are still present".
The environment and the area of ​​residence also influence
After the effects of the Civil War and poverty, the stature of the Spaniards increased very significantly in the second half of the twentieth century, which made Spain had the largest increase in all of Europe.
The differences between regions have also been reduced, which for decades have been very marked with a common denominator: the highest were in more economically developed regions such as the Basque Country and Catalonia, with up to two and three centimeters more.
Even so, studies point to differences between rural and urban areas.
For example, in rural areas of the Basque Country the height was higher than in cities for access to milk;
a relationship that occurred to the contrary in Mediterranean areas.
However, the study of the data suggests other variables such as climate and the influence of the environment.
The case of the Canary Islands is very significant because, being a region of the less economically developed, historical data show that the height of its inhabitants is similar to that of richer regions.
"This gives us the opportunity to investigate the influence of climate on size and the effects that climate change can have on height," says researcher José Miguel Martínez Carrión.
The level of literacy or birth weight are other variables studied and included in these works that open research paths to delve into the effects that social inequality has had and has on stature.
In addition, studies show that size perpetuates the stagnation of the development of societies, since a short stature is associated in many jobs with low productivity.
Knowing the extent of malnutrition and stunting in the past, such as the contexts that drove the increase in adult height in the last century, provides a valuable knowledge to understand current problems and to intervene with success in future policies on childhood and adolescence
All the studies published now are part of the work done in the IVWorkshop of Anthropometric History held at the beginning of 2018 at the University of Murcia.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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