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Stunting, starvation, and refeeding - a review of forgotten 19th and early 20th century literature.

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-05-03, 13:44 authored by Michael Hermanussen, Barry Bogin, Christiane Scheffler
AIM: To scrutinize to what extent modern ideas about nutrition effects on growth are supported by historic observations in European populations. METHOD: We reviewed 19thand early 20thcentury paediatric journals in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the third largest European library with an almost complete collection of the German medical literature. During a three-day visit, we inspected 15 bookshelf meters of literature not available in electronic format. RESULTS: Late 19thand early 20thcentury breastfed European infants and children, independent of social strata, grew far below World Health Organisation (WHO) standards and 15-30% of adequately-fed children would be classified as stunted by the WHO standards. Historic sources indicate that growth in height is largely independent of the extent and nature of the diet. Height catch-up after starvation was greater than catch-up reported in modern nutrition intervention studies, and allowed for unimpaired adult height. CONCLUSION: Historical studies are indispensable to understand why stunting does not equate with undernutrition and why modern diet interventions frequently fail to prevent stunting. Appropriateness and effect size of modern nutrition interventions on growth need revision. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Acta Paediatr

Citation

HERMANUSSEN, M., BOGIN, B. and SCHEFFLER, C., 2018. Stunting, starvation, and refeeding - a review of forgotten 19th and early 20th century literature. Acta Paediatrica, 107(7), pp. 1166-1176.

Publisher

© Foundation Acta Pædiatrica. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-03-11

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: HERMANUSSEN, M., BOGIN, B. and SCHEFFLER, C., 2018. Stunting, starvation, and refeeding - a review of forgotten 19th and early 20th century literature. Acta Paediatrica, 107(7), pp. 1166-1176, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.14311. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.

eISSN

1651-2227

Language

  • en

Location

Norway

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