RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Self-reported Health is Related to Body Height and Waist Circumference in Rural Indigenous and Urbanized Latin-American Populations
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 562942
DO 10.1101/562942
A1 Juan David Leongoméz
A1 Oscar R. Sánchez
A1 Milena Vásquez-Amézquita
A1 Eugenio Valderrama
A1 Andrés Castellanos-Chacón
A1 Lina Morales-Sánchez
A1 Javier Nieto
A1 Isaac González-Santoyo
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/13/562942.abstract
AB Body height growth is a life history component. It involves important costs for its expression and maintenance, which may originate trade-offs on other costly components such as reproduction or immunity. Although previous evidence has supported the idea that human height could be a sexually selected trait, the explanatory mechanisms that underlie this selection is poorly understood. Moreover, despite the association between height and attractiveness being extensively tested, whether immunity may be linking this relation is scarcely studied, particularly in non-Western samples. Here, we tested whether human height is related to health measured by both, self-perception, and relevant nutritional and health anthropometric indicators in three Latin-American populations that widely differ in socioeconomic and ecological conditions: two urbanized samples from Bogota (Colombia) and Mexico City (Mexico), and one isolated indigenous population (Me’Phaa, Mexico). Using Linear Mixed Models, our results show that, for both men and women, self-rated health is best predicted by an interaction between height and waist, and that the costs associated to a large waist circumference are differential for people depending on height, affecting taller people more than shorter individuals in all population evaluated. The present study contributes with information that could be important in the framework of human sexual selection. If health and genetic quality cues play an important role in human mate choice, and height and waist interact to signal health, its evolutionary consequences, including its cognitive and behavioral effects, should be addressed in future research.