A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Best practice principles for community-based obesity prevention : development, content and application

Best practice in obesity prevention has generally been defined in terms of &lsquo;what&rsquo; needs to be done while neglecting &lsquo;how&rsquo;. A multifaceted definition of best practice, which combines available evidence on what actions to take, with an established process for interpreting this information in a specific community context, provides a more appropriate basis for defining the principles of best practice in community-based obesity prevention. Based on analysis of a range of literature, a preliminary set of principles was drafted and progressively revised through further analyses of published literature and a series of consultations. The framework for best practice principles comprises: community engagement, programme design and planning, evaluation, implementation and sustainability, and governance. Specific principles were formulated within this framework. While many principles were generic, distinctive features of obesity prevention were also covered. The engagement of end-users influenced the design of the formatting of the outputs, which represent three levels of knowledge transfer: detailed evidence summaries, guiding questions for programme planners and a briefer set of questions for simpler communication purposes. The best practice principles provide a valuable mechanism for the translation of existing evidence and experience into the decision-making processes for planning, implementing and evaluating the complex community-based interventions needed for successful obesity prevention.<br /

The effectiveness of food system policies to improve nutrition, nutrition-related inequalities and environmental sustainability: a scoping review

A global transformation of food systems is needed, given their impact on the&nbsp;three interconnected pandemics&nbsp;of undernutrition, obesity and climate change. A scoping review was conducted to synthesise the effectiveness of food system policies/interventions to improve nutrition, nutrition inequalities and environmental sustainability, and to identify double- or triple-duty potentials (their effectiveness tackling simultaneously two or all of these outcomes). When available, their effects on nutritional vulnerabilities and women’s empowerment were described. The policies/interventions studied were derived from a compilation of international recommendations. The literature search was conducted according to the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews.&nbsp;A total of 196 reviews were included in the analysis. The triple-duty interventions identified were sustainable agriculture practices and school food programmes. Labelling, reformulation, in-store nudging interventions and fiscal measures showed double-duty potential across outcomes. Labelling also incentivises food reformulation by the industry. Some interventions (i.e., school food programmes, reformulation, fiscal measures) reduce socio-economic differences in diets, whereas labelling may be more effective among women and higher socio-economic groups. A trade-off identified was that healthy food provision interventions may increase food waste. Overall, multi-component interventions were found to be the most effective to improve nutrition and inequalities. Policies combining nutrition and environmental sustainability objectives are few and mainly of the information type (i.e., labelling). Little evidence is available on the policies/interventions’ effect on environmental sustainability and women’s empowerment. Current research fails to provide good-quality evidence on food systems policies/interventions, in particular in the food supply chains domain. Research to fill this knowledge gap is&nbsp;needed.</p