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)

The impact of the method of consent on response rates in the ISAAC time trends study

BACKGROUND: Centres in Phases I and III of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) programme used the method of consent (passive or active) required by local ethics committees. METHODS: Retrospectively, relationships between achieved response rates and method of consent for 13-14 and 6-7-year-olds (adolescents and children, respectively), were examined between phases and between English and non-English language centres. RESULTS: Information was obtained for 113 of 115 centres for adolescents and 72/72 centres for children. Both age groups: most centres using passive consent achieved high response rates (>80% adolescents and >70% children). English language centres using active consent showed a larger decrease in response rate. Adolescents: seven centres changed from passive consent in Phase I to active consent in Phase III (median decrease of 13%), with five centres showing lower response rates (as low as 34%). Children: no centre changed consent method between phases. Centres using active consent had lower median response rates (lowest response rate 45%). CONCLUSION: The requirement for active consent for population school-based questionnaire studies can impact negatively on response rates, particularly English language centres, thus adversely affecting the validity of the data. Ethics committees need to consider this issue carefully. © 2010 The Union

Genomics of quality traits

The quality attributes of cereal grains are valued in the context of a complex food chain that integrates outputs achievable by breeding, production, and processing. New processing technologies, environmental change, and changes in consumer preferences demand that quality attributes of wheat and barley need to be continually modified. The advances in the genomics of quality described in this chapter provide the basis for ensuring that the genetic approaches encompassing the complexities of the gene networks underpinning quality attributes can meet the challenges presented by the rapid changes occurring within the food chain