The state of nutrition in the past is one of the most intractable of

The state of nutrition in the past is one of the most intractable of historical problems. Any appraisal of former living conditions must attempt to assess the adequacy of diets, yet most records of the past tell us little about what people ate and whether or not the diet met their needs. Descriptions of food in history—the conventional approach to the question—fail to evaluate sufficiency. Attempts to overcome this difficulty through the measurement of diet have generally either assessed whether the total food supplies available in a community were enough for its population or analyzed food price trends and tax revenues as indices of overall consumption. Institutional menus and typical working-class diets drawn up by social reformers have also been employed as models of normal regimens. At best, these techniques measure the availability of food without providing much evidence about its social distribution. At worst, they are hypothetical analyses that offer little insight into actual dietary norms.

But opportunities for the study of nutrition in history have not been exhausted. Because the birth weight of infants is closely associated with the nutritional status of their mothers during pregnancy, analysis of birth weight samples offers a means of assessing the quality of diet in the past. However, here too there are pitfalls, for influences other than maternal nutrition affect the weight of a child at birth: the mother’s health, her pregnancy history (the number of children she has borne), and the genetic character of both the mother and the child. Clearly, nutrition is a primary influence on maternal health, and the quality of the maternal diet during pregnancy is closely correlated with maternal weight gain during pregnancy, which is the most common index now employed to assess nutritional sufficiency between conception and childbirth. Undernourished women commonly bear smaller children than do those whose diets are adequate. But the precise relationship between maternal nutrition and fetal growth is still far from evident.

And while high caloric intake is closely linked with high maternal weight gain and high neonatal weight, neonatal weight does not typically decline unless significant deprivation occurs in the third trimester of pregnancy, as studies of famine in Holland have shown.

1. Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as an influence affecting birth weight?

A. The infant’s genetic characteristics
B. The mother’s general health
C. The number of children previously born to the mother
D. The mother’s level of physical activity during pregnancy
E. The mother’s nutritional status during pregnancy