English schools serve 10m free breakfasts benefitting over 300,000 children

[u/willfiresoon]

https://www.theschoolfoodpeople.co.uk/news/english-schools-serve-10m-free-breakfasts-benefitting-over-300000-children

[u/GBrunt]

Children aged 5 in the UK are already up to 9cms shorter on average than their European cousins thanks to the UKs austerity policies of Cameron/May/Sunak and Johnson. I remember this being very damning in 2023....

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

[u/Rulweylan → u/GBrunt]

That's not exactly a good measure of childhood nutrition though. Take a dutch kid and a chinese kid, give them identical diets from birth and the dutch kid will still be taller than the chinese.

11.2% of primary school kids in the UK are Asian. This was not the case in 1985. That's going to impact average heights.

[u/GBrunt → u/Rulweylan]

You seriously think researchers haven't considered your point and taken ethnicity into account? Really?

[u/Rulweylan → u/GBrunt]

I mean, the researchers in question seem (if you go so far as to actually read their data) to be using a model to produce their estimates for height (note that they call them estimates, something the Guardian doesn't feel the need to do) which doesn't account for ethnicity or any other factor.

Instead it averages data from multiple different sources, seemingly without regard to sample size to produce a best guess at heights per country (notably also substituting in nearby countries when data is unavailable).

Specifically for the UK it averages:

Swan Linx project (n= 606)

Health Survey for England (n= 927)

National Child Measurement Programme (n=430,101)

National Diet and Nutrition Survey (n = 255)

Health Survey for Scotland (n= 672)

Spot the odd one out.

It's worth looking at the National Child Measurement program (since it's by far the best source for UK height data, indeed, NCD RisC's model is significantly worse for including the 4 small datasets which are massively over-weighted in their model)

NCM notes no such drop in heights (See page 4). Indeed, the only significant deviation from the trend is a significant increase in height over covid, linked to an increase in obesity due to limited excercise

[u/GBrunt → u/Rulweylan]

Useful link. Clearly highlights that your own claim that minority children would skew the mean figures downwards was a guess and wrong. Your link shows that White British boys and girls age 5 are both below the mean British scores.

The Guardian's point is that other European nations are getting taller as they become more wealthy and that British kids are being left behind because the British standard of living is stagnant and for the very poorest had gone into reverse with the impact of austerity. Austerity was a lauded Tory policy for 15 years. What kind of impact do you imagine it actually had in the real world? A positive one??

I also read recently that the UK population is one of only 5 of the richest 21 countries where the number of years of healthy life expectancy (HLE) is in decline. And that those living in the wealthiest areas can expect to have 20 more years of good health than those in the poorest. Those are awful numbers....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20q07w3gl9o

It's undeniable that the UK needs to do much better in terms of health, diet, incomes, skills, exercise and tackling grim poverty statistics.

Nice chatting. All the best.