Demography and Nutrition (PDF)

This exciting and important book covers the impact on demography of
the nutrition of populations, offering the view that the change
from the hunter-gatherer to an agricultural life-style had a major
impact on human demography, which still has repercussions today.

Demography and Nutrition takes an interdisciplinary approach,
involving time-series analyses, mathematical modelling, aggregative
analysis and family reconstitution as well as analysis of data
series from Third World countries in the 20th Century. Contents
include details and analysis of mortality oscillations, food
supplies, famines, fertility and pregnancy, infancy and infant
mortality, ageing, infectious diseases, and population
dynamics.

The authors, both well known internationally for their work in
these areas, have a great deal of experience of population data
gathering and analysis. Within the book, they develop the thesis
that malnutrition, from which the bulk of the population suffered,
was the major factor that regulated demography in historical times,
its controlling effect operated via the mother before, during and
after pregnancy.

Demography and Nutrition contains a vast wealth of fascinating
and vital information and as such is essential reading for a wide
range of health professionals including nutritionists, dietitians,
public health and community workers. Historians, social scientists,
geographers and all those involved in work on demography will find
this book to be of great use and interest. Libraries in all
university departments, medical schools and research establishments
should have copies of this landmark publication available on their
shelves.