Also more likely to have larger babies (on average) are adult mothers, and women with adequate food, and women who don’t have severe health problems (such as pre-eclampsia or hyperemesis) during pregnancy, and possibly women who don’t have to do heavy manual labour or prolonged occupational standing hours during their pregnancy.

So if babies were getting bigger that would be a good thing, because it would suggest women were getting healthier, right?

Oh wait, I forgot. It doesn’t matter if women are healthy, as long as they don’t have the FAT!!! Grrr.

It’s all no win. Everything’s a crisis.

This is a question from a position of ignorance: are tall women also likely to have heavy babies?

Yes. Also more likely to have larger babies (on average) are adult mothers, and women with adequate food, and women who don’t have severe health problems (such as pre-eclampsia or hyperemesis) during pregnancy, and possibly women who don’t have to do heavy manual labour or prolonged occupational standing hours during their pregnancy.

To be clear, I call upon researchers, doctors and the press for this, not Lauredhel herself…

(Incidently, I am glad to see that the UK’s car seat laws actually require a booster seat until age 12 OR 135cm height, whichever comes first. I was 180cm at 12 years of age, a booster seat would have sized me out of some cars!)

Thanks for the post Lauredhel, although I do hope one day to see some moderate conclusions with balanced reporting in this space!

lauredhel your analysis of these issues is a breath of fresh effing air.

Aw *snif*

What cheeses me off (well, among other things) is that this sort of analysis is accessible to millions of folk. I don’t make any pretence to doing anything fancy like getting obscure difficult-to-obtain journals and digging up the original datapoints and re-analysing them in complicated ways that require a stats PhD. Any journalist or commentator with a halfway decent basic education, literacy, a modem, and time can do this.

But almost no one can be bothered.