The Height Gap is chock-full of fascinating factoids:
The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. In a century?s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world. The men now average six feet one — seven inches taller than in van Gogh?s day — and the women five feet eight.
I had heard that the Dutch were the tallest nation in the world, but I didn’t realize that it was a new phenomenon.
What are the benefits of height?
According to one recent study, the average six-foot worker earns a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars more, over a thirty-year period, than his five-foot-five-inch counterpart — about eight hundred dollars more per inch per year. Short men are unlucky in politics (only five of forty-three Presidents have been shorter than average) and unluckier in love. A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the nineteen-sixties showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes.
Many people don’t “get” this:
Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it?s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it?s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That?s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries.
I really, really should have eaten better in high school.
Biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. Any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. (?Iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen I.Q. points,? one nutritionist told me.)
I’m not sure if comparing Charlemagne to French revolutionaries is a good comparison of the 800s vs the late 1700s, but the point still stands:
Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. ?They didn?t look like Errol Flynn and Alan Hale,? the economist Robert Fogel told me. ?They looked like thirteen-year-old girls.?
Most historians assumed height was tied to income.
Fogel knew it wasn?t that simple. In 1974, he and Stanley Engerman published an exhaustive study of slave economics entitled ?Time on the Cross.? Historians had long insisted that slavery was not only inhuman; it was bad business — hungry, brutalized workers made the poorest of farmers. Fogel and Engerman found nearly the opposite to be true: Southern plantations were almost thirty-five per cent more efficient than Northern farms, their analysis showed. Slavery was a cruel and inhuman system, but more so psychologically than physically: to get the most work from their slaves, planters fed and housed them nearly as well as free Northern farmers could feed and house themselves. [...] [A]dult slaves, Steckel found, were nearly as tall as free whites, and three to five inches taller than the average Africans of the time.
Time to get on the paleolithic diet:
(The men of the northern Cheyenne, he found, were the tallest people in the world in the late nineteenth century: well nourished on bison and berries, and wandering clear of disease on the high plains, they averaged nearly five feet ten.) Then he enlisted anthropologists to gather bone measurements dating back ten thousand years. In both Europe and the Americas, he discovered, humans grew shorter as their cities grew larger. [...] For thirteen years, he gathered and analyzed the heights of thirty-eight thousand French soldiers from the late seventeen-hundreds. Peasant conscripts were nearly three inches shorter than their well-bred officers — reason enough for a revolution.
Everyone’s catching up to America:
In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven?t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese — once the shortest industrialized people on earth — have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.The average American man is only five feet nine and a half — less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics — which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans — women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.
Amazing stat:
Around the world, well-fed children differ in height by less than half an inch.
Until now, wealthier people ate better. Now they eat fast food:
Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits. ?If these snack foods are crowding out fruits and vegetables, then we may not be getting the micronutrients we need,? he says. In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet.
Read the whole article. (Believe it or not, this was a mere fraction.)