Weirdly, Canals and Trains Made Pre-Civil-War Americans Smaller

USS ALASKA

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Trains and open waterways spurred an economic boom in the Antebellum, but they also drove down Americans' health. AP Photo

An interesting view point...

Weirdly, Canals and Trains Made Pre-Civil-War Americans Smaller

Laura Bliss
Aug 28, 2018

Why a transportation revolution had some unanticipated side effects. A strange thing happens on the way to modernity: people get sicker and shorter. That’s the “Antebellum Puzzle,” a term for the measurable decline in health of the U.S. population in the four decades ahead of the Civil War, even as urbanization and industrialization sent GDP skyrocketing. Historians have shown that during the economic-boom decades between 1820 and 1860, heights and lifespans shrank for the average American—including white men and women, as well as free black men and women—by as much as an inch.

Full article can be found here - https://www.citylab.com/transportat...nfrastructure-was-bad-for-your-health/568735/

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
That's really interesting and makes sense. Life was also a matter of constant activity, the kind you'd pay a monthly fee to a gym to get now. You worked out without knowing it. I realize it isn't mentioned in the article but surely it also couldn't have helped when increasing population growth in growth to cities and those jobs provided by industries meant a less active lifestyle? Yes, that kind of work could still be brutal. It just wasn't the same kind of work, open air agriculture work and probably the food that went with it.

It's so odd how our landscape changes and it takes awhile to notice. Case in point, a little on the same lines. You know how we have any number of ' PA Dutch ' recipes, well known things like pot pie, shoefly pie, apple crumble and various gooey, carbo loaded, tasty traditional dishes? Dad's elderly ( at the time, this was years ago ) noted the rate of diabetes was extremely high around here. His idea of why made sense. Those high carb, high fat foods were needed in a day beginning at 4 a.m. with labor intensive farming chores. As industry moved in, traditional recipes remained. The sheer labor wasn't there any more to burn through all those calories, weights went up hence diabetes rates.

Having said that, it'd be awfully hard to give up strawberry rhubarb crumble.
 
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Trains and open waterways spurred an economic boom in the Antebellum, but they also drove down Americans' health. AP Photo

An interesting view point...

Weirdly, Canals and Trains Made Pre-Civil-War Americans Smaller
Laura Bliss
Aug 28, 2018

Why a transportation revolution had some unanticipated side effects. A strange thing happens on the way to modernity: people get sicker and shorter. That’s the “Antebellum Puzzle,” a term for the measurable decline in health of the U.S. population in the four decades ahead of the Civil War, even as urbanization and industrialization sent GDP skyrocketing. Historians have shown that during the economic-boom decades between 1820 and 1860, heights and lifespans shrank for the average American—including white men and women, as well as free black men and women—by as much as an inch.

Full article can be found here - https://www.citylab.com/transportat...nfrastructure-was-bad-for-your-health/568735/

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
How about steamboats on the Mississippi and other river systems?
Were they not important to the transportation revolution as well?
Much of the South didn't even need to dig canals, nature provided them.
 
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