Anthropology: What is the Small but healthy hypothesis

SMALL BUT HEALTHY HYPOTHESIS:
The “small but healthy hypothesis” was proposed by Secler David in the 1980’s and it was developed on four points. The first point stated that the adults in developing countries have small bodies because of the poor diets and infections which occur during childhood and therefore the small body sizes were attributes which were desirable for the populations and the causes (Solomons, 2007). The second point was that monitoring of the growing children was recognized widely as excellent tools to detect the health problems and therefore retardation of growth was a warning signal of an increased mortality and morbidity and not an innocuous response of the environmental stimulus.
This hypothesis was proposed by an economist, David Seckler and it has generated heated debates and lively literature. This hypothesis has created thoughtful and emotionally charged rebuttals from different nutritionists such as Latham (1984) and Gopalan (1983). The economist’s views sparked a lot of interest because they resulted in programmatic and policy implications which were different from the conventional (Seckler, 1982)
The “Small but healthy” hypothesis referred to an environment in which the calamity of malnutrition was not of massive proportions because most of the world was “small but healthy”. In Seckler’s view, the only people who were truly malnourished were those one who showed clinical symptoms of malnutrition. The latter, he says, should be given the 1s priority of the nutrition resources, nutrition policies and that food should not be wasted on the “small but healthy populations”.
The small but healthy hypothesis referred to a child who was short but not thin. It meant children whose heights were of two standard deviations below the reference population of the median but whose weight are above this criterion. They are also referred a being stunted but not wasted in the jargon of the day. They are to be found in many third world countries like in Bangladesh, India and in some African Nations. These wasted children are far less common and they don’t exceed 10% of the population. Wasted children who can be classified as unhealthy according to Seckler are those synonymous with Marasmus. To him, it is the stunted and not the wasted child that he calls small but healthy (Wander, 2009).
These benefits might be seen to be an adaptive response because in nutritional immunity, it was noted that the lack of a nutrient in one’s body can play a protective advantage to the individual by preventing access to a nutrient which is wanted for the proliferation of a specific pathogen (Martorell, 1989).
Most of the nutritional scientists believe in the “Deprivation theory” which holds that an individual is well nourished and healthy if he/she grows along his/her genetically determined growth curve and that growth significantly below this curve will indicate that the person i...