Partially refusing early nutrition interventions in Bhutan Shivani Kaul is the winner of the 2025 Graduate Student Paper Award from the Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP) . This piece is drawn from her award-winning paper. Credit: Shivani Kaul, 2023 A health worker in southern Bhutan demonstrating how to use the anthropometric measuring device. “ How to raise the world’s IQ .” “ Cheap fixes could help 450m people stand taller and think quicker .” Recent headlines in  The Economist  reflect a growing policy concern about global child malnutrition, particularly stunting during the “First 1000 Days” of life. For many global health policymakers, infant stunting—when a child is much shorter than the standardized height-for-age—signals not only compromised health but lost future IQ and economic productivity. In this framing, a child’s height becomes a  proxy for national development .…