How to stunt a child with data

We all have defining numbers Your height weight age remaining vaccine shots and number of teeth for instance Your numbers are either normal or abnormal If the latter they can either be fixed or notIf you didnrsquot take your first steps between nine and 18 months you canrsquot fix that If your BMI is 32 though you could bring it down to 22 The question bedeviling me is who decided which numbers are normal and which ones are notLetrsquos talk about human lifespans The global life expectancy is about 73 years and the maximum human lifespan can range between 115 and 123 Jeanne Calment of France dying in 1997 at age 122 is the longestlived human The worldrsquos oldest man is listed as Japanese Jiroemon Kimura who died in 2013 at age 116But there is a bewilderingly long list of oldest men and women On November 16 last year the Guinness Book of Records solemnly announced that ldquothe worldrsquos oldest manrdquomdashJohn Tinniswoodmdashborn the year the Titanic sank had died in a care homemdashat age 112 But some people say one Henry Jenkins lived to 169 years Itrsquos a controversy The title is currently held by Brazilian Joaacuteo Marinho Neto alive at 112 Though the previous titleholder lived 114 yearsWhen asked all of them attribute their long lives to eating small quantities of food and living an active lifeLetrsquos talk about Bombai Click the QR code above to join my WhatsApp group to share your Bombai stories for my bookmdashand perhaps answer some of my Bombai questionsWho decides the numbers that rule our lives Turns out itrsquos WHO The World Health Organization believes there is a standard model human being and sets global standards for their body and health Once these lsquoscientificrsquo benchmarks are defined and accepted they influence global funding priorities insurance risk calculations of heart disease life expectancy and other disorders social policies and sweeping claims about human healthAny significant deviation from WHOrsquos norms would be labelled defective requiring special attention If a child hasnrsquot reached a certain weight or height by age five the WHO will start using words like malnourished wasted and stunted The Global Nutrition Report following WHOrsquos tables reported that 454 million children under 5 are lsquowastedrsquo The WHO says nearly one in six African children is underweightSome will nod their heads and think Sounds about right Thatrsquos why they call it AfricaBased on WHOrsquos charts the Dassanach children of Kenya were declared to be malnourished by charity workers But Herman Pontzer an evolutionary biologist from Duke University saw active happy kids playing like kids everywhere though they were slim and lanky as many East African pastoral tribes tend to be ldquoThey didnrsquot seem low on energy particularly short or lsquostuntedrsquordquo he saidPontzer found that at age two Dassanach children grow taller at rates you donrsquot see anywhere else in the world though they gain weight slowly By five theyrsquore taller than chubby wellfed European and American children but with a weight that WHO didnrsquot like They concluded they were malnourished probably because of a dietary deficiency But to Pontzer their metrics were a sign that they had adapted uniquely like most human communitiesEskimos are rounder usually overweight and shorter compared to say Masais and live happily with cholesterol levels that would alarm most cardiologists Based on WHO global standards nearly a quarter of children in the AsiaPacific are stunted About 17 per cent of humansmdashabout a billion are zinc deficientHow does the WHO decide these metrics that define the standard model human Turns out unsurprisingly that their earliest tables were based on white Caucasian populations One of the earliest WHO global paediatric health standards was based on data from a single American community in Yellow Springs OhioTo rectify this new standards were released in 2006 using data from dispersed locations like Norway Oman Brazil India Ghana and California Because the study left out Pacific Islanders Indigenous Americans and East and Southeast Asians now seven per cent of Japanese children are labelled as lsquostuntedrsquo compared to one per cent in the Netherlands Both are rich countries with excellent nutrition and health careThe Body Mass Index BMI used to define obesity mistakenly classifies stocky Pacific Islanders as fat and misses obesity in leaner South Asians More than half of Indian children are classified by WHO as malnourishedMy mind wanders I look at WHOrsquos numbers on lsquonormalrsquo blood pressure blood sugar and even diet and wonder who influences them Why is 12080 normal and who is it normal for and at what age How do the Yanomami people of the Amazon eat inordinate amounts of salt without experiencing hypertension or heart disease while Numidian nomads never eat salt without any health issuesWHO claims that 90 per cent of India where we live in direct scorching sunlight most of the year are Vitamin D deficient based on research gathered from Europeans and AmericansWhich brings me back to humankindrsquos great zinc deficiency mentioned earlier The next time someone talks about the planetrsquos billion zincdeficient people remind yourself that WHOrsquos data for asserting this was collected by the International Zinc Nutrition Consultative Group between 1976 and 1980 nearly half a century agoAll the study participants were AmericansYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper