Can shorter mothers have taller children? Nutritional mobility, health equity and the intergenerational transmission of relative height.

This study develops the concept of nutritional mobility, defined here as the probability that a mother ranked low in her cohort's height distribution will have a child who attains a higher rank order. We demonstrate that rank-order regression provides a robust metric of health equity, revealing differences in opportunities for each child to reach their own growth potential. We estimate four indicators of nutritional mobility and test for associations between nutritional mobility and various local economic and environmental factors. Nutritional mobility has improved over time, and the nutrition environment contributes about 2.86 times as much as a mother's height to her child's expected rank in height-for-age. Populations with the least mobility are in Latin America, and the most mobility is in more urbanized areas of Africa and Asia. Rank-order mobility is an important aspect of health equity, offering valuable insight into the role of socioecological factors in nutrition improvement across generations.