Rapid Matltration and Ageing 3 95 



fruit flies and cantaloupe seedlings. Dublin (1953), using 

 the figures of the Metro]X)litan Life Insurance Company of 

 New York, has further indicated that fat people who lose 

 weight live longer. We know very little about the elfects of 

 overnutrition in childhood, but there are strong indications 

 that it may be important. For some time past it has been 

 tacitly assumed that the maximum growth of children is the 

 optimum; if one child has a greater size than another of the 

 same chronological age and sex there is a tendency to state it is 

 superior. Widdowson (1947), in her admirable study of 

 children's diets, writes of the weights of girls being "in favour 

 of the professional classes" with reference to her finding that 

 these girls were heavier than those of the same age in tw^o 

 other classes; Morant (1950) writes of the height standards 

 for British children of particular ages "improving from 

 decade to decade, if not from year to year". Are children 

 w^ho are heavier necessarily more favourably placed than 

 children otherwise comparable, and is an increase in height 

 necessarily an improvement? 



At the end of the war we measured children evacuated to 

 England from liberated parts of the Netherlands because 

 they were malnourished, children during the famine in 

 Western Holland, and malnourished children in the three 

 Western Zones of post-war Germany. In general these 

 children w^ere nearly normal in height but low in w^eight. In 

 order to compare their heights and weights with standards 

 we searched the literature for these and made the not very 

 original discovery that such standards were of poor quality; 

 for adults they were in general worse. But this study of 

 published figures indicated (Sinclair, 1948) that "insufficient 

 thought has been given to the most desirable rate of growth, 

 which is not necessarily the maximum rate. We can make a 

 boy of twelve years taller and heavier than he would otherwise 

 be by injecting anterior pituitary lobe extract; alternatively 

 we can make him heavier and probably taller by superali- 

 mentation. There is indeed a tendency amongst nutritionists 

 to regard the child of perfect nutriture as placid, rotund, red 



