Economic approaches to nutrition have focused largely on measures of child nutrition and thus have been able to ignore the issue of individual heterogeneity in energy expenditures. Ignoring such an issue may be bad science, however, especially given the case of adults, whose waking hours are devoted mostly to labor activities, the energy costs of which vary enormously.

Paul A. Higgins is a graduate student in the department of economics at the University of Washington. Harold Alderman is a researcher at the World Bank. Priority of authorship is not assigned. Partial support for the project from the Social Dimensions of Adjustment project of the World Bank, and from the U.S. Agency for International Development Cooperative Agreement AFR-000-A-0-8045-00, is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank Lawrence Haddad, Elaina Rose, Insan Tunali, the participants in the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology seminar at the University of Washington, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning June 1997 from Paul Higgins, 3335 Legation St., NW., Washington, D.C. 20015.