No association between fat tissue and height in 5019 children and adolescents, measured between 1982 and 2011 in Kolkata/India

Abstract

Body height has traditionally been looked upon as a mirror of the condition of society, short height being an indicator of poor nutritional status, poor education, and low social status and income. This view has recently been questioned. We aimed to quantify the effects of nutrition, education, sibship size, and household income, factors that are conventionally considered to be related to child growth, on body height of children and adolescents raised under urban Indian conditions. We re-analyzed several anthropometric measurements and questionnaires with questions on sibship size, fathers' and mother's education, and monthly family expenditure, from two cross-sectional growth studies performed in Kolkata, India. The first Kolkata Growth Study (KG1) took place in 1982-1983, with data on 825 Bengali boys aged 7 to 16 years; and the second Kolkata Growth Study (KG2) between 1999 and 2011 with data of 1999 boys aged 7 to 21 years from Bengali Hindu families, and data of 2195 girls obtained between 2005 and 2011. Indian children showed positive insignificant secular trends in height and a significant secular trend in weight and BMI between between 1982 and 2011. Yet, multiple regression analysis failed to detect an association between nutritional status (expressed in terms of skinfold thickness), monthly family expenditure and sibship size with body height of these children. The analysis only revealed an influence of parental education on female, but not on male height. We failed to detect influences of nutrition, sibship size, and monthly family expenditure on body height in a large sample of children and adolescents raised in Kolkata, India, between 1982 and 2011. We found a mild positive association between parental education and girls' height. The data question current concepts regarding the impact of nutrition, and household and economic factors on growth, but instead underscore the effect of parental education.

Intergenerational changes in adiposity and fat distribution from 1982 to 2011 in male children and adolescents from Kolkata (India)

“…This means that the trend value was between 1 and 1.7 percentage points, per decade. The secular increase in overall body adiposity of the Indian population, especially boys, was also mentioned in the earlier analysis of the Bengali population . The direction of presently observed intergenerational changes was convergent with the one noted by Olds in most countries around the world .…”

Association of anthropometric indices of nutritional status with growth in height among Limboo children of Sikkim, India

“…It is used as a proxy of low fat free mass among children in resource poor setting (Reilly 2017). This simple measure of energy reserve can be regarded at par with the measure of skinfold thickness (Scheffler et al 2018). So, the present study considers MUACZ, BAZ, and WAZ as measures of energy store in the human body, that is, as energy/nutritional status (Scheffler et al 2020).…”

Community‐based clustering of height in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam

“…The sources discussed by the authors show that children needed only a few weeks after the war to catch up in height to their pre‐war cohorts. Further, no effect of nutrition on height was seen in Indian or German children, see Pospisil, Czernitzki, and Scheffler () and Scheffler, Krützfeld, Dasgupta, and Hermanussen (), respectively.…”