TITLE:
Comparative Analyses of Height Growth Velocities of School Boys in South Korea and Japan in the Past 50 Years
AUTHORS:
Hiroshi Mori
KEYWORDS:
Height, School Boys, Growth Velocities, Birth Cohort, South Korea, Japan, Vegetables and Fruit
JOURNAL NAME:
Food and Nutrition Sciences,
Vol.11 No.7,
July
10,
2020
ABSTRACT: The paper
compares the height growth velocities of male schoolchildren in South Korea and
Japan over the period 1961-2018. Growth in height was measured with the same
birth cohorts, not by comparing mean height of ascending ages in the same year.
Starting from a lower economic base and mean height in the 1960s, high school
males aged 17 in South Korea became 3 cm taller in mean height than their
Japanese peers in the mid-2000s versus 2 - 3 cm shorter in the 1960s through
1970s. Children in Japan ceased to grow taller by the end of the 1980s, not
because they quit taking more animal-sourced foods, meat and milk, but because
they had drastically steered away from fruit and vegetables in their diets
since the end of the 1970s. Having largely converged economically with Japan,
South Korean children ceased to grow any taller in the mid-2000s. More importantly,
it was discovered in this study that successive cohorts in South Korea started
to fall gradually but steadily in height growth velocity from 1st graders
in middle school, aged 12 years to 3rd graders in high school, and aged 17 years, to be once again 3 cm below their
Japanese peers in the early-2010s. Analysis of Korea Household Expenditure Surveys classified by age groups of
household head, decomposed by the author, revealed that children under 20 years
of age in South Korea began to steer away from fruit and, particularly,
vegetables in their at-home consumption in the mid-1990s, to average only 15%
of the level of older adults in their 50s in the mid-2010s. These results lend
supports to the importance of fruit and vegetables as determinants in height
and its growth velocities in two genetically similar nations over time and
stages of economic growth.