A new international study finds that the growth and development benefits of children living in cities may have diminished in the past two decades Scie

Rural Children Now Grow Slightly Taller than City Children in Wealthy Countries

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2023-03-29 22:00:03

A new international study finds that the growth and development benefits of children living in cities may have diminished in the past two decades

Science has long presumed that children living in cities grow faster and healthier than rural kids—but that trend has flipped over the past two decades, a new study suggests. A global study published Wednesday in Nature found that the average height of urban children and adolescents ages 5 to 19 is now slightly shorter than that of their peers in rural areas in most countries—notably in wealthy countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and France.

“Where we've historically seen a quite clear benefit for living in cities, that benefit has been slightly diminished over time,” says study co-author Honor Bixby, a population health and epidemiology research fellow at the University of Essex in England. “But it can be viewed as a positive in that rural height is really catching up.”

Cities have long been associated with better health—researchers call this the “urban advantage.” Residents of bustling, developed centers would seem likely to have better access to quality health care, education, safety and nutrition, and barriers to these resources can especially affect children's crucial early growth. “This early stage of life really sets the tone for health in adulthood and later life,” says Bixby, who worked on the study along with more than 1,500 researchers in the Noncommunicable Disease Risk Factor Collaboration, a worldwide network of scientists and physicians. “We specifically look at height and body mass index (BMI) as anthropometric measures of growth and development because [height and weight are] both influenced by the quality of nutrition but also the healthiness of the living environment.” (Some experts and members of the public have criticized the limitations of BMI, its overuse as an accurate assessment of health and its inability to capture variability between individuals. Bixby says it can still be a helpful, however, in estimating averages and trends on a population level.)