We quantify, track and explain the distribution of overweight and of hypertension across Chinese provinces differentiated by their degree of urbanicity over the period 1991-2004. We construct an index of urbanicity from longitudinal data on community characteristics from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and compute, for the first time, a rank-based measure of inequality in disease risk fac...

PurposeAdolescents with higher socioeconomic status (SES) report better mental health. The strength of the association—the “social gradient in adolescent health”—varies across countries, stronger associations countries greater income inequality. Country-level meritocratic beliefs (beliefs that people get what they deserve) may also strengthen social health; SES be more strongly linked to adoles...

The relation between urban industrial air pollution and ill-health, particularly in highly economically developed cities, has been recognized for years now; yet severe urban contamination continues to cause damage particularly to children’s health. Plausible evidence is provided in this paper that changes in both the quality of natural environments and the status of residents’ health is strongl...

0370 M ost people believe that as societies advance economically they have higher levels of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other noncommunicable disease (NCD) risks. However, a more detailed analysis of how parameters of economic development are associated with health outcomes as well as NCD risk factors is needed to inform local and global health policies. Such an analysis might dispel preju...

This paper examines how the patterns of India’s food consumption have been changing in recent times in line with her faster economic growth and generally rising affluence levels. The study, also, presents evidence on the nutritional implications of these changes to reinforce some of the findings on the observed changes in the food consumption patterns. A decline in agricultural, particularly fo...

Once considered a disease of affluence and confined to industrialized nations, obesity is currently emerging as a major health concern in nearly every country in the world. Available data suggest that the prevalence rate of obesity has reached unprecedented levels in most developing countries, and is increasing at a rate that far outpaces that of developed nations. This increase in obesity has ...

Scale-adjusted metrics (SAMs) are a significant achievement of the urban scaling hypothesis. SAMs remove the inherent biases of per capita measures computed in the absence of isometric allometries. However, this approach is limited to urban areas, while a large portion of the world's population still lives outside cities and rural areas dominate land use worldwide. Here, we extend the concept o...