Children's Growth during a Long-run Health Transition: Britain in International Perspective, 1850-1995

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This project will explore how improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and medical knowledge during Britain's long-run health transition from 1850 onwards influenced children's growth pattern in terms of height, weight and BMI. Studying children's growth pattern (velocity of growth and shape of the growth curve) rather than their height at a specific age is a significant methodological innovation. Adaptive theories of human development and growth stress how exposure to poor nutrition or disease, especially in utero, does not merely affect the child's current height but also the timing of the pubertal growth spurt, their velocity of growth and the length of the growing period: in other words, their growth pattern. This project will extend existing knowledge of children's growth in Britain in three ways: first, by reconstructing boys' longitudinal growth measurements from training ship records spanning the century and a half from 1865 onwards; second, by producing and analysing new growth profiles from historical sources; and third, by placing the change in Britain's growth pattern in international context using growth profiles (the average height and weight of children across a number of ages) collected from 1850 to the present from around the world.Four new datasets will be produced and deposited in the UK Data Archive as a part of the project: three individual-level datasets with the heights and weights of children and a dataset with growth profiles for a wide range of countries around the world from 1850 to the present.The data produced will supply a longer-run perspective on the immediate and intergenerational factors influencing children's growth patterns in Britain and internationally and indicate how the shift from an unhealthy to healthy growth pattern took place. The data will also assemble new evidence on historical BMI growth curves and child obesity rates, providing historical context for the current child obesity crisis. The project's findings are particularly relevant to the current discussion about a post-2015 development framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals and to understanding the childhood obesity crisis and will inform health interventions and development policy goals for improving the health of children in both the developing and developed worlds. I am uniquely suited to carry out this research because I have conducted extensive research on historical children's growth and understand the potential problems that surround these data (Schneider, 2013a, 2013b). I have also developed substantial knowledge on the biology of human growth, allowing me to bring a necessary interdisciplinary approach to the project.