Barry Bogin

Loughborough University | Lough · School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Background Dance and dancers reflect happiness, sadness, passion, anger, and all other emotions as every single dancing movement carries a significant signal that goes beyond words. Kathak, an Indian classical dance form, requires a divine balance between the soul and the physical body. This balance allows for a high pain tolerance of the dancers,...

Background: The social, economic, political, and emotional (SEPE) environment plays a crucial role in shaping human development both pre- and post-birth, with direct and independent effects on growth, as research shows. Objectives: This study examines the growth of twins and singletons and their association with maternal education as one of the soc...

This chapter explains that anthropometry is the scientific measurement and analysis of variation in the size and shape of the human body. Anthropometry can provide a relatively quick and inexpensive means for the assessment of nutritional status. Thus, anthropometric assessment most commonly involves the measurement of height, weight, fatness, and...

Background Guatemala suffered from civil war and high levels of inequality and childhood stunting in the second half of the 20th century, but little is known about inequalities in secular trends in adiposity. Objectives To investigate differences in childhood body mass index (BMI) and skinfold thickness trajectories from 1979 to 1999 between three...

Twenty-seven scientists met for the annual Auxological conference held at Aschau, Germany, to particularly discuss the interaction between social factors and human growth, and to highlight several topics of general interest to the regulation of human growth. Humans are social mammals. Humans show and share personal interests and needs, and are able...

Background Assessing socioeconomic inequalities in health and nutrition in developing countries receives much attention from both researchers and policymakers. However, the assessment of socioeconomic status (SES) is not straightforward. Researchers have either used a single proxy indicator or applied principal component analysis (PCA) -a dimension...

An anthropological perspective includes evolutionary/historical and biocultural contexts. Both contexts require an appreciation of human life history biology, especially the stages of human growth, development, and maturation and how these stages have been shaped by nutritional requirements and, simultaneously, how these nutritional requirements ar...

Twenty-four scientists met for the annual Auxological conference held at Krobielowice castle, Poland, to discuss the diverse influences of the environment and of social behavior on growth following last year’s focus on growth and public health concerns (Hermanussen et al., 2022b). Growth and final body size exhibit marked plastic responses to ecolo...

Aim: To assess the association of father’s education and occupation with children growth measured by height-for-age z-scores and BMI-for-age z-scores in a patriarchal culture where father’s social position is considered more important than mother’s social position. Sample and methods: The present cross-sectional study consists of 387 school-going g...

Background: Hope and love are popular themes of literature and art in many human societies. The human physiology of love and hope is less well understood. This review presents evidence that the lack of love and/or hope delays growth disturbs development and maturation and even kills. Main body: Love and hope intersect in promoting healthy human dev...

Objectives: We investigate associations between children exposure to stressful events, considering: (1) the period in which the event took place, (2) the type of event, and (3) the cumulative effect of the events on children's weight, height and body mass index (BMI). Methods: A total of 8429 Portuguese children (3349 exposed to at least one str...

Background: The UK Bangladeshi community is socially disadvantaged, and many adults suffer from obesity, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. Rapid aging has been noted. Objectives: Analyse biosocial trade-offs in growth, adult body composition, and reproduction, which are risk factors for age-related decline in physical performance, more rapid a...

Despite diversity in growth, development, and aging across species, the human life cycle is unusual. This chapter reviews the general pattern of human growth and development, reproductive adulthood, aging and senescence, and associated theoretical models for why humans came to be slowly maturing, reproductively successful, and long‐lived large‐bodi...

The aim of the present exploratory study was to assess the changes in urinary oxytocin (OT) concentration during the period between five days before, and on the day of match, among rugby and handball players. Nine male rugby players with a mean age of 27.62 years (SD = 4.21) and 18 male handball players with a mean age of 17.03 years (SD = 0.57) pa...

Carl Bergmann was an astute naturalist and physiologist. His ideas about animal size and shape were important advances in the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century. Bergmann’s rule claims that that in cold climates, large body mass increases the ratio of volume-to-surface area and provides for maximum metabolic heat retention in mammals and birds. Conve...

Mr. Oktay Kaynak, an independent researcher, was in charge of local arrangements. Twenty participants were included: seven from Russia, eight from Turkey, three from the United Kingdom, and one each from Portugal and Japan. The first purpose of the conference was to highlight current research on human biological approaches in studies of human evolu...

We humans are the most social of all mammals. If reared in isolation, we fail to develop physically and mentally, and the brain may fail to reach normal size. The typical human infant is physically helpless, therefore in constant physical and behavioral contact with caregivers (viz: our concept of biocultural reproduction). One issue we address is...

A century’s research has shown that inequality in society makes everyone less healthy, including rich people. Despite this, almost nothing has been done to address the problem (see Nature 592, 674–680; 2021). Inequality increases every year in most nations, and affects every aspect of our lives.

Background There is a recurring and seamless interaction between the biology of human development and the social-economic-political emotional (SEPE) environment. The SEPE environment influences the quality of the material conditions for human biology and, simultaneously, human growth in height and other dimensions provide social and moral signals t...

Open Access from DOI: https://doi.org/10.52905/hbph.v1.7 There is a close association between human biology, epidemiology and public health. Exposure to toxic elements is one area of such associations and global concerns. The Bengal Delta Plain (BDP) is a region where contamination of ground water by arsenic has assumed epidemic proportions. Apart...

This study analyzes the influence of grandmothers’ household residency on the presence of low height-for-age and excessive fat (FMI = fat mass [kg]/height [m2]), waist circumference, and sum of triceps and subscapular skinfolds in a sample of 247 6- to 8-year-old urban Maya children from Yucatan, Mexico. Between September 2011 and January 2014, we...

Background Stunting is defined by the public health community as a length- or height-for-age <−2 SD of a growth standard or reference and is claimed to be caused by poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Material and Methods Stunting is common at all income levels in middle- and low-income countries. At the hi...

Objective Prevalence of stunting is frequently used as a marker of population-level child undernutrition. Parental height varies widely in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and is also a major determinant of stunting. While stunting is a useful measure of child health, with multiple causal components, removing the component attributable to pa...

Current methods for infant and child nutritional assessment rely on anthropometric measurements, whose implementation faces technical challenges in low- and middle-income countries. Anthropometry is also limited to linear measurements, ignoring important body shape information related to health. This work proposes the use of 2D geometric morphometr...

Objectives: Cohort variation in adult height expresses both the impact of socio-economic change on human biology in a wide temporal perspective and social inequalities within populations. We aimed to test the use of joinpoint regressions to identify periods in which changes in height trends were statistically significant. Methods: Data correspon...

I am pleased to announce the publication of Patterns of Human Growth, 3rd edition Barry Bogin 2021. The book may be purchased in paper or as an eBook from Cambridge University Press. Here is the description from the book cover. This new, completely revised and updated edition provides a synthesis of the forces that shaped the evolution of the h...

Objectives The aim of the present study was to assess the changes in urinary oxytocin concentration during the period between five days before, and on the day of match, among rugby and handball players. Methods The study used a repeated measures design with the relative oxytocin level as the outcome variable measured at two subsequent points of ti...

Objective: Stunting (height-for-age < -2 sd) is one of the forms of undernutrition and is frequent among children of low- and middle-income countries. But stunting perse is not a synonym of undernutrition. We investigated association between body height and indicators of energetic undernutrition at three critical thresholds for thinness used in pu...

Background Adrenarche involves maturation of the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal axis and increased production of dehydroepiandrosterone and its sulfate ester, dehydroepiandrosterone‐sulfate (DHEA‐S). It occurs at ages 6 to 8 in industrialized populations, marking the transition from childhood to juvenility and cognitive development at middle childh...

Background: This systematic review aimed at collecting, analyzing and summarizing scientific studies focusing on psychosocial factors that influence linear growth among humans. Methods: The online database "PubMed" was used in order to acquire suitable scientific studies. These studies were evaluated based on clearly defined criteria that determine...

Aim: Influence of nutrition in human growth failure, especially stunting, is a well-accepted idea. The present study assesses the influence of nutrition and non-nutritional factors on height growth in a short stature population. Material and methods: The present study was conducted among the children and adolescents of Sikkim, India. The sample siz...

This study documents differences in childhood IQ trajectories of Guatemala City children, aged 6–15 years and born 1961–1993, according to school attended, height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ) and over time (Flynn effect). IQ data come from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala Longitudinal Study of Child and Adolescent Development. IQ was measured using...

Previous studies have demonstrated a negative, significant impact on birthweight associated with the current economic crisis in Spain, which has also been reported for other European countries. Effects by parity are not known. Our aim is to compare the trends in low birthweight (LBW) by parity in Spain from 1996 to 2016. Using the National Vital St...

Background: WHO documents characterize stunting as, "…impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation." The equation of stunting with malnutrition is common. This contrasts with historic and modern observations indicating that growth in height is largely inde...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We are pleased to to reply to the comments of Tanjung et al. about our article 'Stunting is not a synonym of malnutrition' (Eur J Clin Nutr. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-019-0439-4). We provide additional current and historical evidence that stunting is not a synonym of malnutrition.

Objectives: To analyze the relationship of birth weight, birth order, breastfeeding duration, and age of introduction of solid foods with height, fat mass, and fat-free mass in a sample of Maya children when aged 6 to 8 years old. Methods: We collected data on anthropometry, body composition, children's birth weight, birth order, early feeding p...

Globalization is an economic force to bring about a closer integration of national economies. Globalization also has effects on human biology. Food globalization brings about Nutritional transition, the most common being a shift from a locally grown diet with minimally refined foods, to the modern diet of highly processed foods, high in saturated F...

The postnatal life cycle of the social mammals, including the nonhuman primates, has three basic stages of development: infant, juvenile, and adult. Human beings are unusual and add a childhood stage after infancy and an adolescence stage after the juvenile stage. The human pattern of life history in both brain and body growth entails a large inves...

Objectives: Plasticity in the growth of body segments between populations has been researched in relation to migration, temporal change and high-altitude studies. We study the within population variation in body segments, thus controlling for some of the environmental and genetic differences that could be at play in between populations studies. We...

Objective To investigate changes in socio-economic inequalities in growth in height, weight, BMI and grip strength in children born during 1955–1993 in Guatemala, a period of marked socio-economic-political change. Design We modelled longitudinal data on height, weight, BMI and hand grip strength using Super-Imposition by Translation and Rotation...

We critically analyze definitions of Growth stunting and low height-for-age, Height-for-age on the arbitrary cut-off points that classify people dichotomously as “Stunted” or “non-stunted.” We discuss how individuals may be included or excluded in one of such categories, depending on the Standard or references used, and list inherent Health implica...

Today a considerable proportion of Yucatecan Maya reside in urban areas, with the city of Merida being a site with a long history of settlement. The Maya bring with them a historical legacy of poverty and abusive treatment during the more than 500 years of European and then Mestizo domination. This chapter discusses, from a human ecology perspectiv...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund Noch immer gründen heutige Analysen genetischer Zwillings- und Familienstudien auf mathematischen Ansätzen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, namentlich von Galton, Pearson und Fisher, und führen zu konventionellen Schätzwerten für die Heritabilität der Körperhöhe zwischen h² = 0,87 und h² = 0,93 bei Männern und zwischen h² =...

The clinical audience is wedded to the idea that stunting is nutritional. Also among the nutrition community there is “convergence on the use of length‐for‐age as the indicator of choice in monitoring the long‐term impact of chronic nutritional deficiency” [1]. These discernments are puzzling. The associations between nutrition and growth, and also...

Adult height is the most commonly used biological indicator to evaluate material and emotional conditions in which people grew up, allowing the analysis of secular trends associated with socio-economic change as well as of social inequalities among human populations. There is a lack of studies on both aspects regarding urban populations. Our study...

Background: Nutritional interventions to prevent stunting of infants and young children are most often applied in rural areas in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Few interventions are focused on urban slums. The literature needs a systematic assessment, as infants and children living in slums are at high risk of stunting. Urban slums are c...

Objectives The objective of this study was to investigate the association between physical growth in preadult life with five outcomes at ages 64 to 76: weight, body mass index (BMI), estimated body fat percentage, hand grip strength, and mortality. Methods Super‐imposition by translation and rotation (SITAR) growth curves of 40 484 Guatemalan indi...

Childhood IQ has been used to predict later life outcomes across disciplines in epidemiology, education, and psychology. Most often only a single childhood IQ test is available or is used for these purposes in the belief that IQ is stable across the life course. The primary aim of this study was to examine the longitudinal stability of individuals’...

An evolutionary and biocultural approach is taken to the study of human growth and development. The evolutionary perspective focuses on the unusual process of human postnatal growth and development, a process that takes two decades to complete and traverses the stages of infancy, childhood, juvenility, and adolescence. Human childhood and adolescen...

Medicine is grounded in the natural sciences, among which biology stands out with regard to the understanding of human physiology and conditions that cause dysfunction. Ironically, evolutionary biology is a relatively disregarded field. One reason for this omission is that evolution is deemed a slow process. Indeed, macroanatomical features of our...

Objectives The purpose of this study was to analyze the association between birth mode and fat mass index (FMI = fat mass [kg]/height [m]²), and z‐score values of waist circumference (WCZ) and sum of triceps and subscapular skinfolds (SumSkfZ) in a sample of 256 6‐ to 8‐year‐old urban Maya children from the cities of Merida and Motul in Yucatan, Me...

Children in slums are at high risk of acute malnutrition and death. Cost-effectiveness of community-based management of severe acute malnutrition programmes has been demonstrated previously, but there is limited evidence in the context of urban slums where programme cost structure is likely to vary tremendously. This study assessed the cost-utility...

Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), DALYs averted, and cost per DALY averted under different social weighting scenarios comparing the treatment and prevention programme versus ICDS standard care. DALY[K;r] denotes the applied age weighting constant (K) and discount rate (r). (DOCX)

Database including all cases during the time period with data for anthropometric measurements. (XLSX)

Cost centres and their descriptions for Aahar acute malnutrition programme. (DOCX)

Detailed costs per cost centres and average costs per children in USD for the community based treatment and prevention programme. (DOCX)

Mean Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), Years of Life Lost (YLL), Years of Life lived with Disability (YLD) for the community based treatment and prevention programme (Aahar acute malnutrition programme) versus ICDS standard care only (base scenario) disaggregated for SAM, MAM and normal. (DOCX)

The primary purpose of the study was to obtain information about the processes of growth and maturation that operate in children and adolescents, and how those processes influence changes over time in learning and other school related behavior. A second purpose of the study was to establish reference data, or norms, of growth for Guatemalan childre...

Mr. Oktay Kaynak, an independent researcher, was in charge of local arrangements. Twenty participants were included: seven from Russia, eight from Turkey, three from the United Kingdom, and one each from Portugal and Japan. The first purpose of the conference was to highlight current research on human biological approaches in studies of human evolu...

Human nutritional ecology encompasses the biocultural relationships between people and their food. From a biological perspective, food is central to life because of the essential nutrients it provides, which are needed for growth, repair, and maintenance of the body. From a medical perspective, food is central because of the consequences of diet an...

Mr. Oktay Kaynak, an independent researcher, was in charge of local arrangements. Twenty participants were included: seven from Russia, eight from Turkey, three from the United Kingdom, and one each from Portugal and Japan. The first purpose of the conference was to highlight current research on human biological approaches in studies of human evolu...

Summary The Bangladeshi population is one of the fastest growing ethnic groups within the UK. In 2011 the Bangladeshi population resident in England and Wales was 447,201, or 0.8 per cent of the total UK population; this is an increase of just over 50 per cent from the previous census in 2001 (ONS, 2012). Additionally, this group is reported to be...

This chapter describes Project MINA, an intergenerational and transnational project using a mixed-methods approach to investigate migration, nutrition, and ageing in two generations of Bangladeshi women living in the UK or Sylhet, Bangladesh. Results indicate that varied migration histories and changing family structures play an important role in i...

Comunicamos resultados centrales de un proyecto multidisciplinario que abordó la corporeidad humana como un producto social, histórico, inmerso en un campo de ejercicio del poder. Nuestros estudios de grupos mayas en Mérida, Yucatán, realizados en los últimos quince años, evidencian las consecuencias a largo plazo de las condiciones de vida en que...

Objective: to evaluate the impact of the economic crisis on the disparities in the prevalence and risk of low birth weight (LBW) according to the maternal socioeconomic profile. Methods: the data analysed corresponds to 1,779,506 single births to Spanish mothers in the years 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. The temporal changes in available mate...

Twenty-two scientists met at Krobielowice, Poland, to discuss the impact of the social environment, spatial proximity, migration, poverty, but also psychological factors such as body perception and satisfaction, and social stressors such as elite sports, and teenage pregnancies, on child and adolescent growth. The data analysis included linear mixe...