Hamish over at FiF recently posted a link to this New Yorker article discussing why on average Europeans are getting taller, while Americans haven’t had an increase of average height in 50 years.
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 can confirm that there is something similar going on in Germany. In the US, there were taller women around, but I, at 5’8″, was generally one of the taller women in any group. I am short here. German women TOWER over me. I have to buy petite pants here because regular pants are about six inches too long for me (I do, admittedly, have short little Fred Flintstone legs).
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.
And if you read the article, the researcher states that he did not include Asians and Hispanics in his measurements, so you can’t explain this away with the old different immigration argument.
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.
Anyways, I’m glad that we will be having our baby in Germany, although I’m not certain I want to stay here all the way through my kid’s adolescence yet!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
yup, the average US american diet is rubbish. but the german diet has deteriorated recently, too. however, nothing beats the UK diet. — how did they ever build an empire?
I think we did it on sugar. Exploited the colonies to get it, then fed it wholesale to the working classes to give ‘em cheap energy. Or at least, that’s what happened in the 19th century. Before then, no idea. Mutton and turnip? Allegedly we had world-class cuisine then though. And lost the plot during the Industrial Revolution.
Turkey Twizzler, anyone?
@rita: I think the diet in all industrialized nations is suffering from the export of American fast food unfortunately. When I was in Italy, one of the professors there said that the young people don’t want good Italian food, they want McDonalds!
@b: What the heck are Turkey Twizzlers? I know of Twizzlers, which are red licorice, so are they Twizzlers made of dried turkey?
It’s turkey flesh that’s been blasted off the bones, moulded into a twizzle shape, coated in crispy “bread crumbs” and then frozen. Then you heat them up in the oven. Notorious in the UK after Jamie Oliver’s series on school food.
@B: Hmmm… not sure about Turkey Twizzlers. They sound a bit suspicious, but if they’re that bad for you, I guess they are probably pretty tasty.