The comment by John McCain during the presidential debates that the average North Korean was three inches shorter than the average South Korean prompted Tara Parker-Pope at the NYT Health blog to ponder the same question for the U.S. The truth of the matter is that non-immigrant, native born Americans are getting shorter relative to their European counterparts.
Per the blog post:
Just like with the North Koreans and South Koreans, the height gap between Americans and Europeans is a relatively new development. The New Yorker article notes that the average American soldier during World War I was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955, the data began to shift. The Germans and other Europeans grew an extra two centimeters a decade, or a little under an inch, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in 50 years.
According to Mr. Bilger, researchers have found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, “which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teenage eating habits.”
In other words Bilger believes that American babies are not getting fed as well as they use to due to the greater separation between the rich and poor. A controversial rationale indeed. Another reason could be that American diets overall have moved away from more nutritious home cooked meals to more processed, less nutritious meals eaten outside home. Regardless of the cause, the fact is clear that non-immigrant Americans are being outpaced in growth relative to Northern European countries.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
What about the shorty-short Mexicans and Asians immigrating into the land of the free? Hey, don’t look at me. I’m 6’1″, thank you very much. I have enough problems walking down the street and children yelling “Yao Ming!” at me.
This also reminds me — the humor magazine at my undergrad school had a headline that said “Average [SCHOOL NAME] student height lowers every year since affirmative action ended.”
FYI, the studies take immigration and separation of non-hispanic white Americans into regard.
Breastfeeding.Too many new mothers find it inconvenient.That’s stupid.It’s not.My wife actually slept through late night sessions.It’s free.It’s better for the kids.Mine are the tallest in their classes.Colds are less bothersome.Formula feeding is dumb unless there are unavoidable problems.
Breastfeeding is a good start. However, not all moms have generous maternity leave policies which facilitate this, and bottle-feeding is only one reason. The bigger problem is our diet heavy in refined carbs and processed foods and light in fresh produce, clean fish, nuts and seeds.
Given that the nation w/the best average height is Holland (men 6 feet, women, 5-8) I wonder if they breastfeed more than normal?
First of all, I find this quote bizarre:
“And then [McCain] summoned a bizarre statistic, saying that the average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean.”
How is neatly encapsulating the vast differences between North and South “bizarre?” This raised the bullshit flag on this article right away. The New York Times: Advocating socialism since Walter Duranty.
So I did a little Googling and found a good fisking of this meme from 2004:
http://armor.typepad.com/bastardsword/2004/04/scientist_confi.html#more
Money quote:
“The Dutch living in Holland are finally reaching the same height that Dutch Americans have had all this time, height differences which have been long noted in the literature. The reason the Dutch Americans shot up like weeds after leaving Holland is that Dutch are naturally tall, because, get this, their families are made up of tall people. Height has a genetic component, and in rich countries is considered 90% heritable. Vikings were big people, and Icelanders are still some of the tallest in the world.”
if i recall correctly-and this was an interesting issue two or three years ago when much of the research was published-the average height of americans is not sub-par, but the median is. this was one of the main linkages to wealth disparity as contributing factor during the three short periods in a person’s life when height is determined.
very interesting studies, but as marvin minsky pointed out recently, one way to deal with population stress on the planet’s resources is to simply engineer smaller humans. the meek shall inherit the earth. go shorty!
Every time McCain opens his mouth he gets a little shorter.
Touché “michael”.
Perhaps we should put the kids in charge of everything. They’re short and, frankly, I trust their sense of honesty more than the adults nowadays. We would at least have more fun probably, as well as naps.
Humm, I wonder if being twice your healthy body weight causes a compression of your spine/vertibral discs, hips, knees, resulting in a loss of height. If so, small wonder the average height of a population would decrease as the average weight increases !
From the study we find that
1. Americans were unusually tall compared to Europeans among those born before 1955.
(Two world wars and the resulting social and economic effects affected heights for European children born during that time? Shocking.)
2. Among babies born 1955-1975,American heights stagnated while European heights increase, to the point where white Americans are only high average (9th) instead of the tallest.
(When there are no major wars to disrupt societies and economies, European kids will be as tall as American kids? Shocking.)
3. The only strange thing is that Americans in the 1975-1983 birth cohort started getting taller again. If memory serves, that seems to match up well with the comeback of breast feeding in the States.
(#9: Calling “Touché” when someone says something you already agree with is bad form. Now, is someone ‘scores a touch’ on your Obamessiah, it would be more appropriate for you to count it.)
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