[Solved] What is the “small but healthy” hypothesis?

SMALL BUT HEALTHY HYPOTHESIS: The “small but healthy hypothesis” was proposed by Secler David in the 1980`s and it was developed on four points. The first point stated that the adults in developing countries have small bodies because of the poor diets and infections which occur during childhood and therefore the small body sizes were attributes which were desirable for the populations and the causes (Solomons, 2007). The second point was that monitoring of the growing children was recognized widely as excellent tools to detect the health problems and therefore retardation of growth was a warning signal of an increased mortality and morbidity and not an innocuous response of the environmental stimulus. This hypothesis was proposed by an economist, David Seckler and it has generated heated debates and lively literature. This hypothesis has created thoughtful and emotionally charged rebuttals from different nutritionists such as Latham (1984) and Gopalan (1983). The economist`s views sparked a lot of interest because they resulted in programmatic and policy implications which were different from the conventional (Seckler, 1982) The “Small but healthy” hypothesis referred to an environment in which the calamity of malnutrition was not of massive proportions because most of the world was “small but healthy”. In Seckler`s view, the only people who were truly malnourished were those one who showed clinical symptoms of malnutrition.