A century of trends in adult human height

Irish male here too, have gone from being around average in the early 90s to being noticeably below

Similar things happened in China. I was the last generation that grew up in poor China, in the sense that we were malnourished without sufficient intake of animal proteins when growing up (to be accurate, it is before we were 13~14 years old. After that, the living standard got a big jump.) Among ~200 of high school classmates who talk regularly with each other in a WeChat group, some have children of 16 years old or older. They all said their children are already much taller and stronger than they are.

Makes sense even on the naive level.

The heart has to work harder, so the heart problems.

Body volume is larger, therefore more chances for cancer.

The introduction is irrelevant to the research, which is a basic descriptive analysis. It's clear they're not qualified to assert significance or causation.

> The main strengths of our study are its novel scope of estimating a century of trends in adult height for all countries in the world and for both sexes.

That's really its only strength.

I think one obvious factor is immigration from shorter on average countries like Mexico and Central America.

>The Guardian story says: "European countries now scoop the top 10 positions for height, with Dutch men and Latvian women the tallest for their sex. That, says Bentham (1), could be down to the introduction of a welfare state in many European countries."

That fails to consider the obvious explanation - you are comparing small EU countries with low ethnic diversity, uniform lifestyle and high standard of living with stringent immigration to a huge ethnically diverse country with a huge immigration flow.

> Shouldn't the world's richest nation be doing better?

I think you'll find that the US is the 9th richest country in the world:

https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-coun...

Us Brits are way lower, at #27 (and falling due to brexit no doubt).

Keep in mind that this is "increase in height over the past 100 years" which does not translate to "current standard of living." If a country already had a fairly high standard of living, one would expect that simply throwing more calories/protein into the mix wouldn't do much -- the population could be nearing its "peak height" already. If you're a poor country whose standard of living hasn't improved much over the last 100 years, your "average height increase" may look identical to those countries in the first category, but for very different reasons.

In addition, like one of the commenters mentioned, the US has seen tremendous immigration from countries (Top countries that people immigrate to the US from: Mexico, India, China, The Philippines, Cuba) that, on average, have been shorter than European and West African populations, also contributing to the change in average height.

If you look at some of the other "rich countries" in the list, they're smack dab in the middle of some other surprising countries. Sweden is between Vanuatu and Botswana, and Germany's increase in height is identical to North Korea's, for instance.

You make the assumption that being taller is better, even outside of social-perceptive advantages.

Otherwise you're making the assumption that Japan, because shorter, is somehow worse than a taller population country than Belgium.

Most Hispanic immigrants to the US come from poor, often very indigenous parts of their countries. Those people are usually very short.

I'll bet that if you look exclusively at descendants of 1914 Americans, they would be in the top 10, or at least close to it.

It's true that Americans of European ancestry are not growing taller at the same rate as their European cohorts. This could be partially due to childhood obesity. A diet rich in sugars leads to early puberty and counter-intuitively, decrease in overall height. "Precocious puberty leads to accelerated growth, accelerated bone maturation and ultimately reduced stature."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15073143

You're ignoring genetics.

May be it is true for populations but not for individuals ?

At a guess:

Populations get taller though improved nutrition and reduced disease risks. Those tend to be associated with a range of really good things. But, within a population nutrition and disease tend to rise and fall together so the negative impacts of height are more important.

Alternatively, height is only apparent in your teen years, more people getting that far has huge impacts on overall longevity.

Yes this article doesn't seem to control for childhood nutrition.

And with higher earnings and education, it says, which smells a lot like they're not trying to isolate it as a factor. I'm pretty sure they could add that taller people are better at speaking English and get more vacation time than shorter people.

Click the image, then use the "Open in new window" link at the bottom. (yes, still a pain)

Well, it is related slightly regarding height. Overall disappointing domain name :)

I'm guessing no data on pygmies. Probably no pygmy army conscription.

Maybe