ABSTRACT
The Infancy, Childhood, Puberty (ICP) model of fetal and childhood growth proposed by Johan Karlberg divides human growth into three successive and partly overlapping stages that reflect the shifting influences of the endocrine control mechanisms of the growth process. The timing of the Infancy Childhood Transition (ICT) is contingent on the child's nutritional status, and is delayed in the face of nutritional constraint. Protein-energy malnutrition results from the interaction between insufficient food energy from macronutrients, and diseases. Malnutrition causes growth faltering and micronutrient deficiency. Evolutionary theory adds a new dimension to the understanding of child growth and growth faltering. It asserts that traits such as life history components respond to environmental cues in order to enhance growth-fecundity-survival schedules and behavioural strategies that yield the highest fitness in a given environment. Long-term health implications of this finely tuned adaptive response to the nutritional environment becoming maladaptive in post-industrial societies of the twenty-first century and beyond have yet to be fully appreciated.
