[retrac]

To be blunt, yes. People with poor nutrition, particularly in childhood, experience both physical and mental stunting, some of which is irreversible. Certain diseases which have been curtailed or eradicated in developed countries inflict a similar toll.

I'll give a concrete example that combines both effects. Hookworm is an intestinal parasite that causes nutritional deficiencies in the host. Children with hookworm are impaired across the board, mentally and physically. They can't run as fast or read as well as their hookworm-free peers. If we compare two otherwise comparable populations, one with hookworm and one without, we would expect the hookworm-infected population to be less intelligent on average.

I'm not saying this to look down on anyone. Human populations always show enormous variation, anyway, so it says nothing much about any individual. But that burden, of physical and mental impairment and chronic illness, due to poor nutrition and infection, is a significant barrier to development, and a major part of why parts of the less developed world remain less developed. And it's why I believe childhood vaccination, disease eradication and nutrition programs in poorer countries are some of the best things we could spend our resources on, in terms of furthering human development.

[eptcyka]

>To be blunt, yes. People with poor nutrition, particularly in childhood, experience both physical and mental stunting, some of which is irreversible.

I don't disagree, but I was trying to substantiate this point once and I couldn't find any one good source that would confirm such a statement. Would you mind sharing a reference to some good source material approving the conjecture that poor nutrition in the childhood causes mental and physical stunting?

[retrac]

This study [1] deals specifically with brain imaging in the malnourished, but it starts off with a pretty good literature review in section 1 and 2 that may offer you some pointers. This [2] is a review of the literature on the question of childhood nutrition and brain development, see particularly the section "long-term consequences of undernutrition in early life":

> Many studies have compared school-age children who had suffered from an episode of severe acute malnutrition in the first few years of life to matched controls or siblings who had not. These studies generally showed that those who had suffered from early malnutrition had poorer IQ levels, cognitive function, and school achievement, as well as greater behavioral problems. [...]

> Chronic malnutrition, as measured by physical growth that is far below average for a child's age, is also associated with reduced cognitive and motor development. From the first year of life through school age, children who are short for their age (stunted) or underweight for their age score lower than their normal-sized peers (on average) in cognitive and motor tasks and in school achievement. Longitudinal studies that have followed children from infancy throughout childhood have also consistently shown that children who became stunted (height for age < −2 SD below norm values) before 2 years of age continued to show deficits in cognition and school achievement from the age of 5 years to adolescence.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/72/4/267/1...

[yrgulation]

This is just one of the many ways of "proving" that people in developing nations are somehow inferior. The same people that grew up with poor nutrition perform quite well when relocated to other countries. While in developed regions there are people with access to food yet dumb like a kite. I think we should be careful with the conclusions we draw. Certainly nutrition, let alone disease or parasites, can lead to reduced mental performance, but deriving the fact that the developing world is somehow suffering from reduced mental power, because of food, as a whole is wrong and in my view dangerous.

[retrac]

A nice thing about the hookworm example is it applies within the United States. It was common historically in the South, but not the North. This may well account for some of the stereotypes about the lazy, stupid Southerner, as well as the gap in economic development and educational attainment. [1]

> How much credit, if any, hookworms can take for those lingering economic challenges and misconceptions, however, is nearly impossible to measure, although some have tried. Hoyt Bleakley, an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan, used early to mid-20 th century census data and records from the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission to compare educational and economic gains in places where hookworm eradication did and did not take place. He found an increase in school attendance and literacy in relation to hookworm reduction and also discovered that those effects seemed to extend into adulthood, with better-educated children growing up to be higher-earning adults. This suggests, Bleakley writes , “that hookworm played a major role in the South’s lagging behind the rest of the country.”

> “If you compare places in the South with the worst versus the least hookworm problem, you’re talking differences in income of maybe 25%,” he says. “There are lots of reasons why the South had a different developmental path than the rest of the country, and while disease is not the whole story, it was certainly part of it.”

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

Is it so wild to generalize this to the rest of the world?

[yrgulation]

Generalising about the south in the us is as wrong as generalising about the rest of the world.

Incidentally in most european countries you find jokes about the south of the same countries as in the us. Its just something we do with people far and different we look at their ways and call them dumb.

The article tho has made an attempt at proving it with science. Correlation does not imply causation.

You cant simply draw the conclusion that a mass of people are dumb and then make up the science to prove it. Sure there individual and small localised groups affected by it but not whole nations or even massive areas of a country.

Edit: even here on this forum, there is anecdata from people that grew up in poverty with little to eat or poor nutrition yet they perform well given the opportunity. Some from the west, some from asia.

[inglor_cz]

Anecdata can be a distraction from general principles.

There are disabled people who climbed Mount Everest, but that does not mean that disability is irrelevant for your chances.

[User23]

> There are disabled people who climbed Mount Everest, but that does not mean that disability is irrelevant for your chances.

More accurately, there are disabled people who have had sherpas drag them up Mount Everest. To be fair, that's what most so-called mountaineers do these days.

[User23]

It's interesting, because in Germany the southerners are observably much more technically accomplished than the northerners. But there's still that you don't speak High German prejudice.

[mlyle]

You hardly address his point.

You say:

> While in developed regions there are people with access to food yet dumb like a kite.

But he explicitly said:

> > I'm not saying this to look down on anyone. Human populations always show enormous variation, anyway, so it says nothing much about any individual.