British children shorter due to poor diet

[Catosaurus]

Experts have said a poor national diet and cuts to the NHS are to blame. But they have also pointed out that height is a strong indicator of general living conditions, including illness and infection, stress, poverty and sleep quality. Food experts point out that a diet of cheap junk food makes people simultaneously overweight and undernourished.

Has it really become this bad? I’m not from England, but this is on the news today.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study

Air pollution.. have you not seen the smog of cities in the 60s/70s/80s

Woodburners are awful for pollution, I imagine breathing in coal based fires were also awful air pollution wise.

We've come on so well in so many ways. Although the woodburners are back, worse for kids then parents smoking apparently!

I think people like to panic, and if it can be moralises then even better!

We generally are so much healthier. There is another reason for the higher cancer rates imo. I don't know what but it can't be purely down to diet or air pollution. I'm sure homes were a lot more damp without central heating! Although the shite single glazed windows may have let enough air in to circulate air to prevent damp 🤷‍♀️

@Gwenhwyfar

So will people please stop going on about their own DC or deny that height has anything to do with nutrition?

@CatsSnore you’re right - I ate a lot of Findus frozen pancakes as a child but actually my mum cooked an awful lot back in the 80s and 90s.

But it wasn’t like that most days. I’d go for play dates and sometimes it was fishfingers but just as often we would be served poached egg
/beans on toast or home-made flan with peas or home-made shepherds pie. My dd’s friends would sob if I made them eat that! I can sneak spaghetti bolognese onto the menu for a few of them, but mostly they look sad until I offer beige food. The guilt strikes me, but I whip out fruit salad for dessert and seems everyone can cope with that.

Also when I was a child I walked or cycled a lot more - we had no money for a second car so it was walking with an occasional bus. And playing out with friends — so little to do at home, I was always off on my bike to a friend’s house. And a 45 min walk home from school every day (so I could pocket my bus money!). I think exercise is a big factor - we just don’t let our kids move as much now.

Yes, people should stop going on about their own children. It's not relevant.
Or are you trying to quote me? It's not clear.

Well last thread on this concluded it was all the immigrants fault and nothing at all to do with all the nuggets and crisps.

still finding it bemusing that people don’t understand statistics and there’s lots of individual “well I am short and eat well”. Of course there is genetic variation. But they stay relatively stable throughout time. All our genes haven’t all of a sudden changed in the last few years to make kids shorter. The fact is that a large sample is getting shorter vs other large samples. Not one individual child.

Sorry I've read back through my posts and I've babbled streams of thought in a very unreadable manner 😳

"beans on toast "

Baked beans have fibre iron and protein, but also the tins we had in the 80s had too much salt and sugar and were often served with processed white bread. Not really the best example from the 80s/90s.
I'm surprised today's children wouldn't eat it though.

I would be interested to know if UPF in the 90’s was quite what it is now - had we invented all of the chemicals and emulsifiers etc we have in food today?

and is it a cumulative effect if so - does our shitty diet of the 90’s affect our egg / spent quality so our children suffer some of that genetically?

intriguing to say the least.

Diet of your grandmother has been shown to affect your health so I would guess the impact of all the chemicals will be felt for many years

Also is it just diet or lifestyle as a whole?

Ultimately we are animals. We are meant to be outside in the sun, living in communities, eating real food (meat and foraged plants), sleeping well and moving lots.

nobody I know does all of those things consistently.

we are also applying chemicals to our bodies and living in a fog of poor air quality due to cleaning products, cosmetics and outside influences like cars, planes and the like.

I suspect it is a combination of factors.

@ladykale
@JaneyGee

The children are probably "weeping" from hunger because their parents have spent their benefits on an X-box. I'm sorry, but I see this again and again. My cousin lives in social housing and hasn't worked for years. He's got three kids, yet still manages to drive a secondhand BMW and go on fishing trips. My friend's brother also lives in social housing (or, rather, the council seem to have givenhim the council house that he and his brothers grew up in). He's a vain, arrogant pig, with a fake tan and a gym membership. The guy is six foot of honed muscle, yet he's never had a proper job. Like my cousin he lives on benefits. There are potholes everywhere, but he's sat at home watching daytime TV.

Even if what you say is true or correct, does that mean it's ok for us as a society to make the children shoulder the consequences of their poor parenting?

Food standards were brought in so I think they were worse for colouring, sugar, salt etc but I think the types of oils have changed. Palm oil wasn't used.

Playdate beige food was definitely not a thing. You ate as much as you could manage of someone elses mums cooking (I remember trying to eat half a plate of smash and gagging my way through it) as you could.

The issue is I read on here once that being over tall was also an result of obesity….

its the same Shrodingers obesity
as obese people will never reach old age / obesity is responsible for Alzheimer’s disease….
call me a cynic 🤷‍♀️

Has there been an increase in immigration wince 1985? So people have emigrated from countries where the average height is shorter and therefore their British children are shorter affecting the average height?

He was correct 30+ years ago but no more recently than that.

My daughter is almost 30 and raised mostly in Australia. Not a chance that her primary school would have a stream of low-nutrition lunchboxes slide. Ham and cheese did feature widely but on rye/wholemeal bread loaded with salad. Veggie sticks, fresh fruit and unflavoured yoghurt were pretty typical accompaniments with the odd raisin box as a "sweet treat."

Ordinary public school.

@Catosaurus

I have no doubt that the basics of the study are right, and surely it's a combination of genetics and poverty? I'm guessing the children of higher income parents are taller?

I'm curious whether someone more scientifically clued up than me knows the correlation between height at age 5 (cited in the study) and adult height?

Purely anecdotal, but my own children were late growers and at age 5 looked to be headed towards average height, but have ended up at 6'3", 6'4" and 5'10" (DD) and very slender - all considerably taller than me (5'4") and DH is 6'1".

Also anecdotally, we had a fairly idyllic childhood in terms of outside time, exercise, clean air and diet, and both my sister and I ended up shorter than our parents.

Ah. One story where a formula fed child is tall and that discounts all scientific evidence pointing toward extended breastfeeding positively affecting height. Makes sense.

It's annoying to see people crying "immigration" and "genetics." Net immigration to the UK stayed pretty constant and pretty much the same as all other high-income countries between 2010 and 2019, the timeframe this study looked at. It's not a factor.

And genetics would mean that British kids height would stay around the same position in the rankings.

But they didn't. They dropped sharply, and the strongest social change in that time was austerity.

How do you blame immigration or genetics for the sharp increase in children being seen for rickets and scurvy? Scurvy ffs, and rickets?! You don't get these things from a short grandmother.

People saying genetics need to look into epigenetics. There is a lot of room for which genetic traits get presented and which don't. Stop blaming genetics, diet, diet in pregnancy etc all create how we develop.

your breastfed theory
It isn't that poster's theory! Overwhelming evidence is that breast is best.

I'm 5ft4 my husband probably 5ft8. His mum is maybe 5ft1 and dad 6ft. They fled a war torn country in the 90s and my dh says they often didn't have much food and had to ration portions of rice and potatoes etc until they arrived in Europe and got jobs, more money etc. now my mother in law cooks everything from scratch, no processed food at all, no fizzy drinks etc and my youngest BIL who was born in the UK 13 years ago, is now 5ft9. He's taller than all his siblings.

My 5 year old is taller than her classmates and was in 3-4 at 1.8 years and my 2 year old is often mistaken for a 3 year old. Exclusively breastfed. Taller than my brothers kids at the same age and my brother and his wife are way taller than me and my husband!

My SIL didn't breastfeed, but from 6 months of age. As well as formula, her kids have been having yoghurt as snacks (Greek yoghurt) eggs for breakfast. Rice and stews and our cultural dishes for lunch and dinner. And her nearly 2 year old is taller than my 2 year old! He's probably the tallest 20 month old I've ever seen! And all her children have been wayyy taller than the average. Her 10 year old is 5ft8.

I believe genetics plays a part and you're not going to eat your way to being 6ft7 but I believe a bad diet can stop you reaching your potential!

Genetics is the major determiner of height. It absolutely is. No question. Sound nutrition both in-utero and post can allow people to reach a maximum height as determined by their genes.

That is all.

If there is a trend in the UK towards an overall shorter stature I'm not sure that is a nutritional issue. I'd look more that the UK is genetically very mixed, and is not Scandi/Dutch (I have Dutch relatives on my husband's side, believe me, they are not tall because of their fabulous diet). Scandi/Dutch society is very, very socially conservative. There is not as much racial mixing as there is in the UK. Any height trends need a wider lense, I haven't looked at the studies cited but I'd put good money on the fact that that's not the whole picture.

And just for larks, I was bottle-fed and am the tallest woman in my family for at least three generations. My DCs were BF until the age of three, eat a fantastic and varied diet and are both short-arses.

There is no moral superiority in being tall.

So, stop your nonsense.

And,

'Austerity' wasn't a thing until 2010, so any children conceived or born during those years are just hitting puberty now, I'm not sure how accurate any data regarding height will be. It's very short-term, it certainly can't indicate a trend.

Give it 30 years. Then maybe we can have this conversation.

How do you blame immigration or genetics for the sharp increase in children being seen for rickets and scurvy? Scurvy ffs, and rickets?! You don't get these things from a short grandmother

Because 85% of children with rickets are Black or Asian. It's not a secret, or racist. Skin colour and lack of Vitamin D and dairy in diet leads to more rickets in these communities, and the uptake of Vitamin D supplements is low.