I keep meaning to link to this article on how much healthier we are than our 19th century ancestors, but I've been hoping that waiting would lead to me having interesting things to say about it. Not so. Nevertheless, at a time when you often hear that pollutants, corn syrup, bio-engineering, and microfibers are at fault for cancer and heart disease, it's interesting to learn that rates of both were far higher a few centuries ago, and the ailments occurred much earlier in life. Indeed, what's so remarkable about this trove of 19th century health data is that our forebears had a pretty miserable time of it, with most all amassing a couple chronic ailments by their second decade. Some of this is testament to advances in medical care, but much more is the result of sanitation and nutrition, particularly during early life. On that note, one quibble:
In one study, [Barker] examined health records of 8,760 people born in Helsinki from 1933 to 1944. Those whose birth weight was below about six and a half pounds and who were thin for the first two years of life, with a body mass index of 17 or less, had more heart disease as adults.
Another study, of 15,000 Swedish men and women born from 1915 to 1929, found the same thing. So did a study of babies born to women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine, known as the Hunger Winter, in World War II.
That famine lasted from November 1944 until May 1945. Women were eating as little as 400 to 800 calories a day, and a sixth of their babies died before birth or shortly afterward. But those who survived seemed fine, says Tessa J. Roseboom, an epidemiologist at the University of Amsterdam, who studied 2,254 people born at one Dutch hospital before, during and after the famine. Even their birth weights were normal.
But now those babies are reaching late middle age, and they are starting to get chronic diseases at a much higher rate than normal, Dr. Roseboom is finding. Their heart disease rate is almost triple that of people born before or after the famine. They have more diabetes. They have more kidney disease.
This sort of data is often used to prove that size is the determinant of later health. But it seems rather tricky to disaggregate malnutrition from that analysis. To use myself as an example, I was born a couple weeks early at 5.9 pounds. According to this data, I'm fucked. On the other hand, my mother wasn't starving, I wasn't malnourished -- just a couple weeks ahead of schedule. So the question, in part, is whether the determinant is nutrition and health of the mother or the actual period of gestation, something the famine data, when used blithely, conflates.
