New standards for infant growth aims for healthier lives worldwide (AFP)

GENEVA (AFP) - The UN's health agency has released new international benchmarks for children's growth, after research showed that the environment, nutrition and health care were the key factors for the well-being of under-fives regardless of their origin.

The "Child Growth Standards" are meant to show how a healthy infant anywhere in the world should be growing physically in terms of height, body weight and other criteria, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Thursday.

They underline that surrounding health conditions and lifestyles, rather than genetics or ethnicity, are the main causes of differences in physical growth.

"The WHO Child Growth Standards provide new means to support every child to get the best chance to develop in the most important formative years," WHO Director General Lee Jong Wook said in a statement.

"In this regard, this tool will serve to reduce death and disease in infants and young children," he added.

The 30 reference charts are part of a new prescriptive and global approach that replaces the previous descriptive assessment of how children grew in a particular region.

They also establish breastfeeding as the biological norm for the first time, the WHO said. Previous charts were based on a combination of breastfed and artifically-fed youngsters.

One of the new charts applies a global Body Mass Index -- an optimum range of body weight for a given size that is is better known to adults who are grappling with dietary problems -- for under five year-olds.

This should help detect problems with the "double burden of malnutrition" -- either undernourishment or obesity -- early in a child's life, the WHO said.

About 170 million children around the world are estimated to be underweight, and some three million of them die each year as a result of their condition, according to WHO data.

Another 20 million children are overweight, helping to fuel the pool of 300 million adults who are clinically obese and develop chronic disease such as diabetes and cardiac problems.

The standards are the product of nine-year study of 8,440 children in Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the United States.

All of the children were raised in carefully monitored "healthy" environments where breastfeeding, good diets, and infection control through vaccinations or treatment were the norm.

The mothers involved also followed practices such as quitting smoking during pregnancy and ensuring what reserachers determined as adequate health care for their offspring.

The standards will be made available immediately to health professionals.

Apart from being put to use for individual children, the WHO hopes they will also help reveal and correct unhealthy trends in a particular population group.