The impact of early-life nutrition on socioeconomic status, physical health and cognitive function through middle age

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PROJECT SUMMARY Nutrition is a key human capital investment, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where hundreds of millions of children are currently undernourished and well over a billion adults were undernourished as children. Prior evidence indicates that early-life undernutrition is associated with negative effects on physical health, schooling attainment, cognitive skills and wage rates in young adulthood. Given that physical health and cognitive function decline with age, it is important to ask whether early-life nutrition affects the pace of these declines. This is a critical knowledge gap concerning the lifespan impacts of early-life nutrition. This project will use unusually rich longitudinal data from an experimental manipulation of nutrition: the Guatemalan Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) Nutrition Supplementation Trial Cohort (INSTC). INSTC was initiated in 1969 as an experimental nutritional-supplementation program and a number of follow-up rounds have been conducted. Cohort members will be in mature adulthood, 47-64 years of age, during the proposed project, ages at which biological and cognitive aging is considerable in most LMICs. Specifically, the project will explore how experimentally allocated early-life nutritional supplementation affects levels of socioeconomic, physical-health, and cognitive-function outcomes in mature adulthood (47-64 y) and changes in these domains from early to mature adulthood. We ask: Do the nutrition intervention impacts observed earlier in adulthood persist at later ages? Does improved childhood nutrition additionally impact changes in these outcomes as participants age? We will explore these questions by collecting and analyzing a comprehensive set of measures of socioeconomic status, physical health and cognitive function, many of which we have measures in prior waves. The proposed study has high potential impact because of the enormous consequences of childhood undernutrition for the health and human capital of hundreds of millions of people. The research team is uniquely well qualified to investigate this topic; team members have made major contributions to current knowledge about the importance of nutrition over the life-course in LMICs. By using appropriate econometrics and life-cycle human capital models, with full access to the early childhood data, and building on previous studies, the project will transform our understanding of early-life nutrition and the health, cognitive and socioeconomic outcomes of mature adulthood.