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Body mass, nutrition, and disease: nineteenth century current net nutrition during economic development

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Abstract

When other measures for material welfare are scarce or unreliable, the use of average stature and body mass index (BMI) values are related to net nutrition and health. BMI reflects the current difference between calories consumed, calories required for work, basal metabolism, and nutrition required to withstand disease and climatic environments. This study evaluates nineteenth century macro-level nutrition and diseases associated with US BMI variation. Body mass was positively related to calories from dairy products and inversely related to malaria, which had a larger effect on net-nutrition than cholera. After controlling for nutrition and disease, black BMIs and weights were greater than white’s, indicating that nineteenth century social preferences are an unlikely explanation for taller, fairer complexioned whites.

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Notes

  1. Stature was the first biological measure used to understand early health and economic development and reflects the net cumulative difference between calories consumed and calories required for work and to withstand the disease and climatic environment. As stature studies developed, attention transformed from evaluating stature variation over time to factors associated with stature variation. For example, Fogel et al., (1978, 1979, 1982) observed an unexpected mid-nineteenth century stature diminution at the same time that income and wealth monotonically increased (Libergott, 1984; Komlos, 1987; Komlos, 1998; Bogart, 2009). Recent studies consider factors associated with stature variation over time, and the relative important of nutrition versus disease became the topic in stature studies (Komlos, 1987; Coelho and McGuire, 2000; Steckel, 2000; Haines et al., 2003).

  2. See Ricard and Lummaa (2007) and Schneider (2017) for a greater explanation for how fetuses/children of underfed mothers adapt to their nutritional conditions and reach shorter terminal adult statures, which may contribute to adult BMIs being closer to standard BMI categories.

  3. SSEu and SSEr are unrestricted and restricted sum of squared errors.

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Acknowledgements

I appreciate comments from John Komlos, Lee Carson, and Paul Hodges. Shahil Sharma, Chinuedu Akah, Meekam Okeke, Ryan Keifer, Tiffany Grant, Bryce Harper, Greg Davis, and Kellye Manning provided research assistance.

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  1. University of Texas, Permian Basin, 4901 East University, Odessa, TX, 79762, USA

    Scott Alan Carson

  2. University of Munich and CESifo, Shackstrasse 4, 80539, Munich, Germany

    Scott Alan Carson

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Carson, S.A. Body mass, nutrition, and disease: nineteenth century current net nutrition during economic development. J Bioecon 24, 37–65 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-021-09320-0

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