I was reading an article from the New Yorker recently (see credit below), and while the article was not all that new, it is still relevant today. The article basically discussed the strong correlation of height with nutrition and overall health. I already knew that height and development relied on nutrition to a point. For example, I knew that Americans of African descent are on the average several inches taller than their African-living counterparts mainly because of the malnutrition and disease that are more prevalent in many parts of Africa versus the U.S.
What I didn’t realize, though, is that caucasian American’s height has stagnated since the 1950’s and much of Europe’s average heights have continued to rise. For example, Dutch males now average 6′1″, compared to an average American height of 5′9″. And this is not an immigration issue; the studies conducted have taken caucasian Americans of European descent for their sample. Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians have also overtaken the Americans in height in the last 50 years. In fact, recent studies now show that there is little height difference between Japanese and American males.
Two things were surprising to me about this article. First is the fact that height can tell so much. Within a population, height differences are largely genetic. But height variations between populations are mostly environmental. This means that if Swedes are taller than Indonesians, this difference is due mainly to the differences in health, nutrition, and development. The historians and scientists who have been studying these trends have concluded that height is a kind of biological shortcut to compile all factors making up a society’s developmental health.
The second suprising thing is that if this data is true, America’s poor health choices are really having serious effects. Throughout history and to some degree today, a nation’s income has been a good proxy for the nourishment and health of the people. At some point, though, income does not guarantee good health, as America is richer than all of the European nations that have now surpassed America’s height. At the time of the New Yorker article, America’s life expectancy was 28th of 36 industrialized nations, behind the Japanese at the top and many of the European nations. Several studies have concluded there is a more comprehensive health care system in countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, and Germany. And anyone living in America knows about the abundance of fast food, unhealthy snacks at our schools, and diets lacking in fruits and vegetables. It is remarkable to me, though, that this could already be seen in the average heights of Americans in the last 50 years.
I would like to explore this issue a little more. If every nationality and race on Earth were given the exact same diet, standard of living, and upbringing, would we really all be the same height on average after a few generations? I definitely agree that the variations would be smaller, but would any variation remain? It seems intuitive to me that some variation would remain, but it is quite possible that all this time my view of a country or race’s height has been biased by the health and standard of living of that country.
The New Yorker article referenced was titled “The Height Gap” by Burkhard Bilger.
