Century‑long stunting policy roadmap

A newly assembled historical dataset (Eric Schneider et al.) shows childhood stunting fell dramatically across many countries during the 20th century—Japan fell from ~70% to single digits—allowing us to trace which combinations of public‑health, sanitation, and economic changes map to different stages of decline. Comparing present high‑stunting countries to historical trajectories makes it possible to prioritize interventions that historically coincided with large drops in stunting rather than treating it as intractable. — This reframes child malnutrition from a static humanitarian metric into a traceable development trajectory with actionable lessons for policy sequencing and investment in health, sanitation, and food systems.