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A Weighty Issue: Diminished Net Nutrition Among the U.S. Working Class in the Nineteenth Century

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Demography

Abstract

Much has been written about the modern obesity epidemic, and historical BMIs are low compared with their modern counterparts. However, interpreting BMI variation is difficult because BMIs increase when weight increases or when stature decreases, and the two have different implications for human health. An alternative measure for net current nutritional conditions is body weight. After controlling for height, I find that African American and white weights decreased throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Farmers had greater average weights than workers in other occupations. Individuals from the South had taller statures, greater BMIs, and heavier weights than workers in other U.S. regions, indicating that even though the South had higher disease rates in the nineteenth century, it had better net nutritional conditions.

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Notes

  1. $$ \mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}=\frac{\mathrm{Weight}\ \left(\mathrm{kg}\right)}{{\left(\mathrm{Height}\left(\mathrm{m}\right)\right)}^2}. $$

  2. Individuals who receive sufficient net nutrition during their youth reach taller statures, and their BMIs may be lower as they age because their frames have more surface area to distribute weight. In sum, average stature is an easier measure to interpret than BMI because stature measures the net cumulative difference between calories consumed and expended for work and for fending off disease but may not isolate how net current nutritional conditions vary.

  3. All state prison repositories were contacted, and available records were acquired and entered into a master data set. These prison records include Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington (Table 1). I examined female statures in prior studies (Carson 2011, 2013a).

  4. Henderson (2005) demonstrated that these BMI thresholds may have shifted to the right between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  5. Visual inspection reveals that there may have been greater weight rounding for blacks than for whites, which suggests that prison enumerators may have been less diligent when recording weight for black prisoners.

  6. $$ \begin{array}{l}\mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}=\frac{w(K)}{h{(M)}^2}=w{h}^{-2}.\Rightarrow \ln \mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}= \ln w-2 \ln h.\hfill \\ {}{\upvarepsilon}_{\mathrm{BMI},w}=\frac{\%\Delta \mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}}{\%\Delta w}=\frac{d \ln \mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}}{d \ln w}=1;{\upvarepsilon}_{\mathrm{BMI},h}=\frac{\%\Delta \mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}}{\%\Delta h}=\frac{d \ln \mathrm{B}\mathrm{M}\mathrm{I}}{d \ln h}=-2.\hfill \end{array} $$

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Acknowledgments

I appreciate comments from John Komlos, Gary Taubes, Doug Henderson, Joe Beane, Paul Hodges, Meekam Okeke, and two anonymous reviewers.

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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. A Weighty Issue: Diminished Net Nutrition Among the U.S. Working Class in the Nineteenth Century. Demography 52, 945–966 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0384-3

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