It was a news report about the Olympic Hunger Event which introduced me to the word ‘stunting’, as used to describe a form of permanent impairment brought about by seriously deficient diet during early childhood – an extreme form of what we used to call ‘failure to thrive’
Listening to this suddenly clarified a thought which has been hovering around in my mind for some time.
All the advice we get concerning diet, & often other aspects of ‘life style’, all the scientific studies which provide the evidence to back this up, always find that the things that are bad for us are most likely to be typical elements of the life style of the poor, even though, maybe even only a few years ago, they were regarded as available only to the more privileged sections of society.
Take red meat. Right until the end of the C19th the poor were lucky to get the occasional dish of very fatty bacon, apart from roasted oxen on the occasional high day or holiday. Even in my childhood we did not eat meat every day, partly on grounds of economy, partly because it was thought we needed protein from a variety of sources.
But now meat, in the form of burgers or other fast foods, is ubiquitous, cheap & comes with chips, it is seen to offer the poor only a guarantee of a shorter life.
At primary school we suffered the annual school medical exam which involved standing, stripped to your knickers & vest, while the doctor checked that you were developing healthily with no signs of rickets or other deficiency. Both parent & child let out a sigh of relief as he delivered his verdict: ‘You’re doing a good job there, Mother’. Her children were growing up straight & strong on a diet which provided plenty of protein & vitamins.
Thinness to the point of emaciation is now the domain of the well-off who can somehow extract all the nutrients they need from fruit & lettuce leaves.
Obesity, once the mark of the well-fed alderman, is now the disease of poverty in the midst of affluence.
The same goes for childbearing. Once most dangerous to those over 30, it is now most definitely not advised for any woman under 20 – all the evidence shows that it is associated with poor outcomes for mother, child, or both. But the main danger of early childbirth today comes from the damage it does to the mother’s future financial prospects.
It is comforting to many to think that the poor can be made better (in every sense) by learning to eat drink & do the right things, but is it really plausible to think that, for example, meat or age at childbirth can somehow have such very different effects on health in rich & poor.
Or is it possible that the poor tend to be poor because they tend to be in less good health (however defined) from the moment of their conception.
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