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)

Ice–ocean coupled computations for sea-ice prediction to support ice navigation in Arctic sea routes

With the recent rapid decrease in summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean extending the navigation period in the Arctic sea routes (ASR), the precise prediction of ice distribution is crucial for safe and efficient navigation in the Arctic Ocean. In general, however, most of the available numerical models have exhibited significant uncertainties in short-term and narrow-area predictions, especially in marginal ice zones such as the ASR. In this study, we predict short-term sea-ice conditions in the ASR by using a mesoscale eddy-resolving ice–ocean coupled model that explicitly treats ice floe collisions in marginal ice zones. First, numerical issues associated with collision rheology in the ice–ocean coupled model (ice–Princeton Ocean Model [POM]) are discussed and resolved. A model for the whole of the Arctic Ocean with a coarser resolution (about 25 km) was developed to investigate the performance of the ice–POM model by examining the reproducibility of seasonal and interannual sea-ice variability. It was found that this coarser resolution model can reproduce seasonal and interannual sea-ice variations compared to observations, but it cannot be used to predict variations over the short-term, such as one to two weeks. Therefore, second, high-resolution (about 2.5 km) regional models were set up along the ASR to investigate the accuracy of short-term sea-ice predictions. High-resolution computations were able to reasonably reproduce the sea-ice extent compared to Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer–Earth Observing System satellite observations because of the improved expression of the ice–albedo feedback process and the ice–eddy interaction process