Rural Children Now Grow Slightly Taller than City Children in Wealthy Countries
Science has long presumed that children living in cities grow faster and healthier than rural kids—but that trend has flipped over the past three 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.”
Researchers are still trying to tease apart exactly why this is happening, however.
