Height of Male Prisoners in Santiago de Chile during the Nitrate Era: The Penalty of being Unskilled, Illiterate, Illegitimate and Mapuche

Developments in anthropometric history in the Iberian Peninsula have been remarkable in recent decades. In contrast, we barely know about the behavior of insular population groups and infants’ and adults’ growth during the nutritional transition in the Canary Islands. This paper analyzes the height, weight and body mass index of military recruits (conscripts) in a rural municipality from the eastern Canaries during the economic modernization process throughout the 20th century. The case study (municipality of San Bartolomé (SB) in Lanzarote, the island closest to the African continent) uses anthropometric data of military recruits from 1907–2001 (cohorts from 1886 to 1982). The final sample is composed of 1921 recruits’ records that were measured and weighed at the ages of 19–21 years old when adolescent growth had finished. The long-term anthropometric study is carried out using two approaches: a malnutrition and growth retardation approach and an inequality perspective. In the first one, we use the methodology recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) that is based on z-scores. In the second one, we implement several inequality dimensions such as the coefficient of variation (CV), percentiles and an analysis for height and BMI evolution by five socioeconomic categories. The data suggest that improvements in biological well-being were due to advances in nutrition since the 1960s. They show that infant nutrition is sensitively associated with economic growth and demographic and epidemiological changes.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biological Well-Being and Inequality in Canary Islands: Lanzarote (Cohorts 1886–1982)

Candela-Martínez

Martínez-Carrión

Cervantes

2021

“…Most studies in Appendix A have little details on the children’s ethnic/racial background, and therefore it was not possible to identify individual samples with specific ethnic groups (some of which seem historically penalized in height [ 15 ]). However, the samples are jointly expected to resemble Chile’s ethnic/racial composition dominated by a large majority of Mestizo population (mixed Spanish and Amerindian background) with small minorities of Amerindian and European descendants [ 40 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This research agenda has produced a substantial long-term, comparative overview (mostly of the 19th and 20th centuries) of the biological well-being in the Iberian and Latin American region and its relationship with inequality and economic and social development [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Significant research has been done recently on various aspects of biological well-being especially in some of the largest countries of the region such as Argentina [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ], Brazil [ 10 , 11 ], Chile [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ], Colombia [ 17 , 18 ], Mexico [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ], Peru [ 5 ] and Spain [ 23 , 24 ]. However, there is still less knowledge on three specific areas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Escape from Malnutrition of Chilean Boys and Girls: Height-for-Age Z Scores in Late XIX and XX Centuries

Núñez

Pérez

2021

We studied the trends of height-for-age (HAZ) Z scores by socioeconomic status (SES) groups of Chilean boys and girls aged 5–18 born between 1877 and 2001, by performing a meta-analysis of 53 studies reporting height-for-age sample data from which 1258 HAZ score datapoints were calculated using the 2000 reference growth charts for the US of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We found stagnant mean and median HAZ scores of about −1.55 to −1.75 for the general population, and −2.2 to −2.55 for lower SES groups up to cohorts born in the 1940s. However, we found an upwards structural change in cohorts born after the 1940s, a period in which HAZ scores grew at a pace of about 0.25 to 0.30 HAZ per decade. Since this change happened in a context of moderate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, high and persistent income inequality, and stagnant wages of the working class, we discuss the extent to which our findings are associated with the increase in public social spending and the implementation and expansion of a variety of social policies since the 1940s and early 1950s.

“…But not only from an educational perspective. As some studies reveal [ 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 ] literacy can also be interpreted as an alternative measure of social inequality.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rural Height Penalty or Socioeconomic Penalization? The Nutritional Inequality in Backward Spain

Luján

Moruno

2021

This article studies the evolution of nutritional inequality, measured through the male adult height, in one of the poorest regions of Spain, in southwestern Europe: Extremadura. With a wide sample of statures of recruits born between 1855 and 1979, conscripted between 1876 and 2000, the research delves into the urban-rural height gap using coefficients of variation, tests of equality of means and proxy variables of a socioeconomic nature. The results of the analysis reveal that the strong anthropometric growth that Extremadura experienced since the last decades of the 19th century was accompanied by a less internal inequality. The lower heterogeneity did not eliminate, however, the urban-rural height gap during the period under study. In this sense, despite the absence of environmental differences between urban and rural areas in Extremadura, there was a clear rural height penalty in the region from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. Rural punishment was fundamentally related to the greater presence of agrarian workers and the lower presence of wealthy families in villages and small towns. On the contrary, educational differences or differences in terms of nutritional health were not as decisive in the rural height penalization, at least when such differences are measured with the sources of military recruitment.