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What is child stunting — and how has it changed over the last 200 years? Stunting means being too short for one’s age due to chronic undernutrition and disease in early life. It’s one of the clearest markers of cumulative deprivation in childhood. 1)

Why does it matter? Stunting is associated with: • Higher child mortality • Impaired cognitive development • Lower adult earnings • Worse health across the life course It reflects the biological imprint of social and economic conditions. 2)

Today, stunting is a core global health indicator. Globally, rates fell from roughly 47% in the mid-1980s to about 22% today. That’s major progress — but still hundreds of millions of children affected. 3)

But here’s the key question: What happened before modern surveys? How common was stunting in the 19th century? During industrialisation? In early 20th-century Europe or East Asia? Until now, we didn’t have systematic global evidence. 4)

In our new paper (BMJ Global Health), we systematically collected 923 historical growth studies covering 122 countries from 1814–2016. By harmonising height-by-age data, we reconstruct stunting patterns over two centuries. Link: doi.org/10.1136/bmjg... 5)

@ourworldindata.org @maxroser.bsky.social @hannahritchie.bsky.social Not sure if it is easier to reach you all here or on email, but I wondered if Our World In Data would be interested in incorporating our new data into its articles on child stunting, malnutrition and adult stature.

Our data aren't as reliable as the Joint Malnutrition Estimates of child stunting which are currently included because the underlying studies are very heterogeneous, especially for older historical periods.

However, our main takeaway figure (figure 5) highlights countries where we are confident in the underlying trends. I could also re-compute country trends based on high-quality data only: we graded the certainty of evidence for all studies.

Hi Eric! Thanks very much for this. I've passed this on to my teammates, and we'll certainly keep it in mind when we turn our attention back to this topic. What's the best email where we could reach out to you in the future?

And in general, emailing info@ourworldindata.org is best for reaching us. Thanks again!