Prospects for Children’s Height in Japan and South Korea: Perspective from Food Consumption

Abstract

In the past half century, children in Japan and South Korea grew rapidly in height by 2 cm per decade. Children in Japan ceased to grow any taller in the mid-1990s, whereas Korean peers kept growing and overtook the Japanese 3 cm in the mid-2000s and then stopped. In the 1990s, when Koreans caught-up the Japanese in height, per capita caloric supply from animal products in Korea was 150 kcal/day less than in Japan. When Korean children stopped growing in height in the mid-2000s, per capita supply of animal products was still rising. Household Expenditure Surveys classified by age groups of household head were decomposed to demonstrate that children and younger people in Korea started to turn away from vegetables in the early-1990s, and by the end-2010s they ate less than 10% of the vegetables eaten by those aged 50. Similarly, two decades before Japanese height stopped increasing in the early 1990s, the young people started to turn away from fresh fruit. Vegetables/fruit may be essential nutrients to support animal protein intake in human metabolism. Judging from the fact that 1st graders in primary school in Korea declined in mean height by 1.5 cm from 2008 to 2017 and that boys’ height increment from 12 to 17 years of age fell drastically from 18.9 cm in 2005 to 15.5 cm in 2015, it looks as though young people in South Korea will decline in mean height by 1-2 cm in the foreseeable future.