What matters is what works
A paper in The Lancet telling us that British children are becoming fat dwarves. This being something to do with Thatcher – of course – and the absence of a free school milk programme. Or capitalism, the hegemony of industrial agriculture, summat at least which must be changed.
Their evidence is that British children are becoming less fat and taller.
No, really:
Britain is at risk of becoming the short man of Europe as a landmark study has revealed that UK teenagers are not growing at the same rate as those in other countries because of a poor diet.
In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that the global height ranking of 19-year-old British boys and girls has worsened over the past 35 years.
Boys have fallen from 28th tallest in the world, with an average height of 176.4cm in 1985, to 39th in 2019, with an average height of 178.2cm. Meanwhile, 19-year-old girls have dropped from 42nd place, with an average height of 162.7cm, to 49th, measuring at 163.9cm.
D’ye see what they’ve done? The kidz iz getting taller. But the relative position is getting lower. That is, to the extent that height etc is about diet, other places have diets that are getting better faster than ours. Which, given that we’ve just been going through the biggest reduction in absolute poverty in the entire history of our species seems like a logical thing to have been happening.
So, by the standards these medicos are using we’re getting healthier, other people are getting healthier, this is something that needs to change.
The medical profession is going insane, isn’t it?
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If they are ever out of a job they could try vote counting.
We currently have enough problems with the vote counters we've got at the moment without adding a bunch of hypochondriac, alcoholic, scrofulous ex-medicos to the legions of the innumerate.
Note, also that they speak of being the short man of Europe, then show global rankings. Could well be that Britain's ranking improved vis a vis Europe, don't know based on this.
Who cares how tall the average member of my nationality is?
Tim has mentioned frequently, but omits here, that one of the things going on is Britain admitting an unprecedented number of people from short and swarthy places.
The excerpt doesn't provide proof of diet as a cause. Surely healthy food is more available and less expensive than ever, the only problem being that people continue to have values beyond maximizing health and longevity.
Average male height in Pakistan = 1.67 m (5' 6")
When I used to visit Latin America, it was a shock not just using brightly colored money and hearing a foreign language, but the fact that I was suddenly of above-average height (and below-average effective intelligence).
At 5’8” (173 cm) I’m a full head taller than my Irish father. That would have to do with an American diet. My wife is 4’10”. I can tell you though, life is still worth living even if we use a footstool a bit more often. What does surprise me are the number of tall young women. Very few women my age are taller than me, but there are a lot of young women these days who tower over me.
And they all seem to be anorexic as well. Or it could just be that today's kids wear less clothes than we did in my day - they all seem to assume they live in the tropics and dress to match - so they just look skinny.