Poverty and The Nutrition Transition

Data from the past decade and projections for the next 20 years (Murray and Lopez, 1996) indicate a continuing rise in the contribution of no communicable diseases to mortality rates in developing countries, where a large proportion of the global poor lives. But within the developing world population,...

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Economic and technological development and their relationships to body size and productivity

Robert W. Fogel and Lorens A. Helmchen, The growth in material wealth has been matched by changes in body size over the past 300 years, especially during the twentieth century. Perhaps the most remarkable secular trend has been the reduction in mortality. Between 1900 and 1998, life expectancy...

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How better nutrition raised output per capita

Table 2.4 shows secular trends in the daily caloric supply in France and Great Britain from 1700 to 1989. Per capita availability of calories more than doubled in this period in France, and increased by about 50% in Great Britain, where caloric supply was 30% larger than that in France at the beginning of the period. FrameworkHow did the substantial increase in calories per capita affect labor productivity? Labor productivity can be defined as the...

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The effect of improved nutrition on body size, morbidity and mortality The gain in weight 2

As was pointed out earlier, the energy that an individual takes in through food consumption will be spent to maintain body temperature and vital organ functions, as wellas for eating, sleeping, and essential hygiene. The remainder is available for discretionary use, such as work and leisure. It was also shown that the additional calories that became available in the wake of the Second Agricultural Revolution were used to engage in more energy-intensive...

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