Stunting

Stunting is the impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation.

Stunting generally involves being malnourished, chronically infected and underweight.

Cystic Fibrosis generally involves being malnourished, chronically infected and underweight.

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Unlike with CF, research into stunting tends to focus on things like environmental factors and asks "How do you get children nutritionally caught up?" So for me, reading up on stunting was extremely useful for trying to mentally model how environmental factors were negatively impacting my health and what I might be able to do about them.

• Severely malnourished children sometimes fail to gain weight when given more calories. Sometimes, probiotics or similar help remedy this. Takeaway: You need to repair the gut to address malnutrition. Feeding someone more when their gut doesn't work doesn't do much.
• General poor sanitation (a la "there aren't enough bathrooms in the village and people poop in a field") can be a factor in stunting. Takeaway: There is no clear, bright line between your body and your environment. If you want to repair your defective body, you need to get very interested in your environment and what's wrong with it.
• Stunting is associated with low grade, chronic infection in a way that suggests to me that low grade, chronic infection actively interferes with gut function and is either a factor in malabsorption or microbes may be getting the nutrients, leaving you undernourished even if you eat enough. Takeaway: There is no clear, bright line between inadequate nutrition and infection. They each impact the other in a chicken-and-egg conundrum kind of way.

Stunting causes children to be shorter than average or shorter than they should be but it's about more than height. Stunting involves significant impairment and can lead to lifelong chronic health problems, among other issues.

Like cystic fibrosis, stunting is deemed to be irreversible in that you can't generally make up for lost height due to inadequate nutrition and other environmental factors and yet this bit of medical dogma flies in the face of the fact that stunting is about more than just height and some pieces of the problem can be addressed to some degree, such as improving gut microbiota with probiotic supplements.

Elevated blood lead levels in early childhood are a good predictor for stunting. (Source.) This fits well with my hypothesis that cystic fibrosis predisposes people to be more vulnerable than average to metal poisoning.