we briefly considered constraining the scope of our published science to elves and the fey folk but the projected volume of submissions was disappointingly small and the board nixed it early. Refactoring the journal code from 'elfsciences.org' to 'elifesciences.org' was seen as an easy win for everybody.
That's rather interesting. A little bit of anecdote: I'm Irish and come in at about 170cm. When I was younger and in college (around 2000), I was definitely just (and we're talking 1/2cm here) ever so slightly slightly above the norm, but now I'm definitely below it by most of a head. My generation was the last one that grew up in a relatively 'poor' Ireland, and I'm significantly taller than my father was. It'd be interesting to see that study with data from 2016.
Edit: added some extra text to help quantify the difference I see.
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.
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."
(1) co-author of the research from Imperial College, London
>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.
The netherlands have stringent immigration rules? Better call that news hotline!
Anyway, uniform ethnicity does lead to extremes. If the entire world moved to Latvia then it follows that Latvian women would obviously be of average height.
But GDP per capita is a pointless measure if you don't correct for the cost of living. The more interesting number is when you correct for how much you can actually do with the money earned. That's PPP (purchasing-power-parity), the measure in the article.
Note that that doesn't measure quality of life. Qatar may take the top spot in that ranking, but has large amounts of foreign workers employed under some not-so-nice conditions. Almost 90% of the population are foreign workers with temporary residence status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar
Qatar, Lux, Sing, Hong Kong, Brunei, are more like cities then countries. I doubt the UAE is counting their slaves in their GDP numbers. Norway and Kuwait are probably the only real countries in the list that are ahead of US.
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.
This is likely caused by Sweden and Germany being very open to immigration from other parts of the world. Sweden and Germany were very high on the list back in the day, but after relatively high streams of immigration during the late 1900's the average height has dropped.
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."
I wonder if Guatemalan women were really shorter than African pygmies, or they just didn't have data on pygmies. Either way, seems strange to write a long article about extreme heights and not even mention pygmies.
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.
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.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of racial and between-country differences in genetic height & weight: "Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe" http://www.gwern.net/genetics/docs/genetics/2015-robinson.pd... , Robinson et al 2015. So the Dutch are so tall in part because of their excellent social net and public health, yes, but they're still taller than some other comparable countries and that's reflecting genetics. As the environments improve, genetics becomes the limiting factor.
"Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, lower risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and higher risk of some cancers"
Didn't I read just the opposite in an article on Hacker News just a few hours ago? It claimed that researchers were mistaken in the past, yet the studies cited here are from the past 10 years.
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.
World Wide Web, what happened to you? This article has figures and when you click on the figure, you get an animated light box and an animated progress spinner and then you are presented with a figure that's smaller than the original unreadable version you clicked in the first place. The WWW is supposed to be an information system, not a pile of useless animations.
Being 2m tall the only place I am below average height is NBA games. My father was 1.8m and his father was around 1.6 which covers the whole previous century and then some. Of course this is purely anecdotal. I wonder how many there are where the trend is reversed.
A single population group (South Korean women) with an average height increase of 20.2cm over 100 years is absolutely astounding (that's 8 inches for those of you using freedom units). That signifies an enormous improvement in nutrition and healthcare in a relatively short amount of time.
You will find a require to much better realize why stature is different in several locations by various quantities, and make use of this data to better nutrition and health around the world. It will even be invaluable to grasp how much money evolving into bigger continues to be a major contributor to increased longevity and health throughout the world. And online sales on: http://www.crazysales.com.au/
51 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadtrue story.
Edit: added some extra text to help quantify the difference I see.
The growth in the height of American men is the same as Mali, and similar to Burkina Faso. Senegal did better.
Shouldn't the world's richest nation be doing better?
PS There's a story that's easier to read at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/26/tall-story-m...
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."
(1) co-author of the research from Imperial College, London
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.
Maybe that's just The Solution?
Anyway, uniform ethnicity does lead to extremes. If the entire world moved to Latvia then it follows that Latvian women would obviously be of average height.
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).
Note that that doesn't measure quality of life. Qatar may take the top spot in that ranking, but has large amounts of foreign workers employed under some not-so-nice conditions. Almost 90% of the population are foreign workers with temporary residence status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar
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.
Otherwise you're making the assumption that Japan, because shorter, is somehow worse than a taller population country than Belgium.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15073143
I thought most researched suggested the opposite (ex http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/)
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.
http://www.ncdrisc.org/v-height.html
Didn't I read just the opposite in an article on Hacker News just a few hours ago? It claimed that researchers were mistaken in the past, yet the studies cited here are from the past 10 years.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/
More balanced:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
The heart has to work harder, so the heart problems.
Body volume is larger, therefore more chances for cancer.
There is no need for an enhanced ribcage; in heterotopic heart transplantation the old heart is not removed. [1]
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_transplantation#Heteroto...
Across species that line of thinking actually gives rise to Peto's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox
> 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.
/rant
I read previously that tallness is fairly dependent on good nutrition, which would correlate with overall increase in welfare/quality of life.