World height and weight by age distributions?

Question

Where can I find a map or distribution data got each country and even provinces within each country for body height and weight by age and how these very across the world? Thanks.

(Not sure if this question is more suited for this site or for the biology site. If the latter than please migrate my post).

Answer 1

Quandl has some data on height and weight by country, by age, by gender. I hope it can help you get started. A lot of the data, though, is related to malnutrition. Search for "weight" and "height" within each database below. You should get data on heights and weights by country, particularly for children.

Check out the World Bank Gender Statistics Database: https://www.quandl.com/data/WGEN

and the World Bank World Development Indicators Database: https://www.quandl.com/data/WWDI

Disclosure: I work for Quandl.

Answer 2

There is an amazing academic project NCDRisC that deals with this kind of data. Check out the aggregated data sets that they distribute for free.

Also pay attention to the high quality papers that they published in top-ranked journals.

Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128.9 million children, adolescents, and adults. Lancet 2017, published online 11 October 2017

Worldwide trends in diabetes since 1980: a pooled analysis of 751 population-based studies with 4.4 million participants. Lancet 2016, 387:1513-1530

A century of trends in adult human height. eLife 2016, 5:e13410

Worldwide trends in blood pressure from 1975 to 2015: a pooled analysis of 1479 population-based measurement studies with 19.1 million participants. Lancet 2017, 389:37-55