Published in Cureus, the study demolishes an old assumption, that a mother's health and her child's growth run on separate tracks. They don't. They're the same track.
Published Nov 24, 2025 | 8:00 AM ⚊ Updated Nov 24, 2025 | 8:00 AM
Stunted growth in children linked to mother's fat percentage. (iStock)
Synopsis: They studied 893 mothers and their young children across 42 villages and 18 urban neighbourhoods. What they found wasn’t subtle: mothers carrying less body fat had children who stopped growing properly. Out of every 100 children born to mothers with low fat reserves, 41 showed stunted growth, nearly half of them.
Think of a mother’s body like a savings account. When she gets pregnant, her baby makes withdrawals: Calcium from her bones, iron from her blood, fat from her reserves. If the account runs low before pregnancy even starts, the baby grows up short-changed. Literally.
Researchers from the Hyderabad based Indian Council of Medical Research–National Institute of Nutrition(ICMR-NIN) went to Nalgonda district and measured this reality in numbers.
They studied 893 mothers and their young children across 42 villages and 18 urban neighbourhoods. What they found wasn’t subtle: mothers carrying less body fat had children who stopped growing properly. Out of every 100 children born to mothers with low fat reserves, 41 showed stunted growth, nearly half of them.
Published in Cureus, the study demolishes an old assumption, that a mother’s health and her child’s growth run on separate tracks. They don’t. They’re the same track.
“Poor maternal nutritional status before and during pregnancy affects fetal growth, infant survival, and long-term health,” the researchers wrote, calling it “the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition.”
The research team didn’t just weigh mothers and move on. They pinched skin at four spots on each woman’s body: triceps, biceps, below the shoulder blade, above the hip. They measured how thick that pinch was, down to fractions of a millimetre. They wrapped tape measures around waists, hips, and upper arms.
The average mother stood 152 centimeters tall and weighed 50 kilograms. Her body fat percentage measured 25.3 percent borderline adequate by medical standards, but revealing itself as insufficient when measured against her child’s growth.
Among the 893 children studied, 36 percent were stunted, 18 percent showed wasting, and 32 percent registered as underweight. These rates mirror state and national averages, confirming that Nalgonda reflects a broader crisis.
But the age breakdown exposes critical failures. Among one to two-year-olds—the age when children shift from breastmilk to solid foods—43 percent showed stunted growth. Nearly half of toddlers in this study had already fallen permanently behind.
The research isolated which maternal factors predicted child malnutrition most strongly. Height, weight, and body fat percentage all correlated with child outcomes. Short mothers had short children. Underweight mothers had underweight children.
Mothers with low body fat had the worst outcomes: 41 percent of their children showed stunting, 35 percent were underweight. The connection remained strong even after researchers accounted for factors such as income, education, and housing quality.
Previous research in Ethiopia and India showed that each unit increase in maternal body mass index reduced child stunting by 3-4 percent. This study went further, measuring actual fat reserves through skinfold thickness rather than relying on weight-to-height ratios alone.
The results suggest that body composition where and how much fat a mother carries matters more than simple weight measurements. Fat stored below the shoulder blade and around the hips, areas that support pregnancy and lactation, showed the strongest associations with child nutrition.
“This study underscores the link between maternal indicators, particularly body composition, and the nutritional outcomes of children below five years of age,” the authors stated.
Now add in where these families live and how they live.
Maternal physiology isn’t destiny. The study found that household conditions shaped outcomes just as powerfully.
Children in homes without toilets: 46 percent stunted. With toilets: 33 percent stunted. That 13-percentage-point gap represents hundreds of children whose growth failed primarily because they lived in contaminated environments.
Homes without separate kitchens showed 42 percent stunting versus 31 percent in homes with dedicated cooking spaces. The difference captures how smoke exposure and food contamination in shared living areas damages child health.
Income set a clear threshold. Families earning below ₹2,500 per person monthly about ₹83 daily saw 44 percent stunting in their children. Below this line, families cannot afford adequate nutrition regardless of knowledge or intent.
Cooking fuel mattered too. Firewood and kerosene users showed higher stunting than families using gas. The indoor air pollution from solid fuels causes respiratory infections that impair nutrient absorption.
Access to subsidized food grains, clean drinking water, and housing stability all showed up in children’s growth measurements.
Watch what happens with education. Children of mothers who went to university: 27 percent stunted. Children of mothers who never learned to read: 40 percent stunted.
That 13-percent point gap captures everything education does—better jobs, better income, better understanding of nutrition, more confidence navigating healthcare systems, more power to make household decisions.
The researchers ran statistical models to isolate what truly drives child malnutrition when you account for everything else. Maternal education consistently reduced stunting risk. But interestingly, education didn’t significantly affect underweight rates after accounting for other factors. This suggests literacy helps primarily through better decision-making rather than directly changing biology.
The researchers stripped away all the overlapping factors to find what predicts child malnutrition most powerfully.
Stunting links most strongly to: low maternal weight, shorter maternal height, and not having a separate kitchen.
Wasting links to: mothers’ low height and weight, living in rented housing, no access to subsidised food grains, and unsafe drinking water.
Underweight connects to: low maternal height and weight, low body mass index, and no separate kitchen.
“Logistic regression analysis highlighted that lower maternal education, weight, and height, as well as inadequate household facilities, increased the risk of stunting, wasting, and underweight in children under the age of five,” the authors concluded.
Joint families where grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins live together showed lower child malnutrition than nuclear families. The reason seems obvious once you think about it: more working adults means more income. More caregivers means the burden of watching children spreads out. Someone’s always available to cook, feed, or take a sick child to the clinic.
Rural areas registered higher stunting and underweight than cities, but cities showed higher wasting. It’s a pattern that makes sense—rural poverty is chronic and grinding, showing up as stunting. Urban poverty can be acute and unpredictable, showing up as sudden weight loss when work dries up or expenses spike.
Hindu households faced higher malnutrition across all categories compared to other religious communities, though the study didn’t explore why.
The maternal findings suggest something more fundamental: improve women’s nutrition before they get pregnant. Build up their fat reserves, ensure adequate height-for-weight, stock their bodies with iron and calcium and vitamins. The return on that investment shows up in their children’s growth charts.
“These results reinforce the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition,” the authors noted. Breaking that cycle means intervening before conception, supporting through pregnancy and breastfeeding, and ensuring children get proper nutrition from birth through age five.
The study also showed that fixing household infrastructure, building toilets, creating separate kitchens, ensuring clean water produces nutritional gains that rival direct food aid. The percentage-point differences are nearly identical. Installing a toilet might do as much for child growth as increasing household income.
(Edited by Sumavarsha)
