
How We Get Tall - sizzle
http://theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/how-we-get-tall/361881/
======
septerr
Could the fact that America has been a melting pot of immigrants moving in
from various parts of the world affected the average American height? I am
from Southeast Asia, where average heights are less than European or
Americans'. And my impression is more people like me have settled in America
in recent years than say several decades ago, causing the average American
height to go down. In which case, nutrition and healthcare may not be the
(sole) cause.

~~~
ZoF
Yep, this very possibility is stated near the end of the article.

"That’s probably not the full story—immigration and fertility changes play a
role too, after all."

------
Theodores
I would be more interested in a 'door height' study. In lots of rural areas
you have doors that are clearly built with the expectation that nobody taller
than 5'6" would darken the doorway. I believe hats were more prevalent in
these pre-motorcar times so there was even less height consideration made.

Doors tell their own story, big cities have been redeveloped (and bombed)
whereas rural areas or places that have not got much of a look in since the
early days of the industrial revolution have not.

Given that there is no theory that fully holds water on why we grow tall (I
personally blame the Green Revolution), you could probably blur
correlation/causation in a 'door and mattress size' study to conclude that 'if
we make the doors bigger then people grow to fill them'.

------
whiddershins
This article is a fantastic example of un-science presented as narrative.
Conflicting hypotheses about what causes height increase are presented as fact
with no citations and little attention paid to the paradox. This reminds me of
virtually every article I've read on population trends for obesity, diabetes,
heart disease, gun violence ... and what frustrates me is I think the authors
and editors don't realize what complete nonsense this is.

~~~
pcurve
Yep, I was expecting a bit better from the Atlantic. This article shed no new
light on the topic.

------
brianfearn
When we compare individuals within homogenous populations, taller people
actually live shorter lives and have higher rates of cancer and heart disease:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/height_and_longevity_the_research_is_clear_being_tall_is_hazardous_to_your.html)

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Small dogs live longer than big dogs. It's the same in all mammals. Within a
species the smaller individuals tend to have a higher metabolic rate, weight
adjusted, and live longer.

------
tom_jones
I thought the Maasai people of East Africa were the tallest. Their height is
all the more impressive considering their rough lifestyles and nutrition.

~~~
Someone
They may be, but you won't see them influence per country average length much,
as there are no countries where the fraction of Maasai in the population is
large.

------
Gracana
"It wasn’t until well after the invention of cars and antibiotics that the
average European man outgrew today’s average American teenaged girl."

Am I missing something or is that a really bizarre statement?

~~~
rdl
Females are shorter than males. Adults are taller than teenagers.

It's saying it took until the 1930+s for European men to reach levels of
height we'd consider normal for teenaged girls today.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Yeah, this reminds me of a somewhat chilling moment when a chinese teenager
asked me what I was reading about (regression to the mean).

By way of introducing the concept, I asked "if someone is very tall, are their
parents probably taller or shorter than they are?" "Shorter". So far so good.

"If someone is very short, are their parents taller or shorter?" "Shorter".

Apparently, to the current generation, no matter how short you are, your
parents are shorter. Long live the CCP :/

~~~
yen223
As people get older, their height gets shorter. It's not entirely wrong to
believe that your parents will be shorter than you, no matter what your height
is.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This process has limits. Older chinese aren't short because they're old,
they're short because of nutritional stress.

Also, shrinking isn't a linear process. You spend most of your life only
shrinking a small amount; most of it happens toward the very end:

> For both sexes, height loss began at about age 30 years and accelerated with
> increasing age. Cumulative height loss from age 30 to 70 years averaged
> about 3 cm for men and 5 cm for women; by age 80 years, it increased to 5 cm
> for men and 8 cm for women.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547143](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547143)

------
tokenadult
I'm seeing the usual comments about life expectancy and IQ here, so I had
better respond to both issues.

First of all, and I encourage readers to follow the links for more details,
today we have longer life expectancies at birth, at age 40, at age 60, and at
even higher ages than ever before.[1] Whatever it is that we are eating these
days, so far our diets aren't undermining the steady long-term trend of
increasing life expectancy at ALL ages all over the developed world. An
article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy
doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] tells the story of the steady
improvements in prevention and treatment that have reduced all-cause mortality
and morbidity for Americans and for most people in the developed countries. I
have been stunned to realize I now have several aunts and uncles who are past
the age of 90 and still living independently and in reasonably good health. A
couple years ago I was shopping for a birthday present for my own mother, now
more than 80 years old, and I found multiple birthday cards for 80th and 90th
birthday cards for sale at the bookstore where I was shopping. Lots of people
are living a long time now.

But don't just take my anecdotes as evidence. Check what professional
demographers write about the issue in peer-reviewed journal articles and say
about the issue in press interviews. Girls born since 2000 in the developed
world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to
enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human
Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in
2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading
scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life
expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever
before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live
to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has
increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six
hours a day."[4]

There are also comments here about human brain size and human cognitive
ability. First of all, it is entirely clear that human cognitive ability as
gauged by "g-loaded" IQ tests has been rising for the last century.[5] That's
over a time span that doesn't include any noteworthy increase in brain size
and is surely a result of environmental factors. The general trend of hominin
evolution over millions of years is a general increase in brain size and a
general rise in signs of intelligent behavior like skillfully made tools and
visual art, but there is not a completely linear relationship between brain
size found in fossils (which are a very limited sample of early hominin
specimens) and signs of cultural advancement.[6] Cultural innovation can now
be transmitted culturally all over the world, so that a small number of
innovators can change the material resources and improve the lifestyles of
most of humankind. You may not need to be smart enough to invent anything,
because you are already smart enough to use most new inventions, wherever they
come from.

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

[2]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

[3] [http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

[4]
[http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[5] [http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-
us/directory/beyond...](http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-
us/directory/beyond-the-flynn-effect)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_h...](http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents)

[6] [http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-
nean...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-neanderthal-
skull-to-neanderthal-brain/)

------
juggty_dev
I thought the Tutsi were the tallest people.

------
Dewie
> John Komlos, an economic historian who has studied height extensively,
> thinks we Americans lost our height advantage because of poorer overall
> healthcare and nutrition compared to Europe. Our social shortcomings, he
> believes, are literally making us come up short.

"lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down
to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".

~~~
crusso
With an added hammer pounding for European-style healthcare, which is
mentioned three or four times while considering American immigration influx
from "shorter" populations is a throwaway word at the end of the article.

~~~
muyuu
I also find the "taller is better" a bit unscientific. So, 10, 20 ft tall is
better?

~~~
Dewie
There certainly seems to a popular opinion/belief that tallness is inherently
good; describing a person as tall seems to often be a compliment (at least for
men). But I'm not sure that is the case for this article. It seems to be
saying that overall tallness in a general population might indicate that the
people of the population have had a good childhood, on average, with regards
to nutrition and such. But, if you have two people from the same population
(in this case, countries), one being tall and the other one short, their
stature is probably more attributable to their genes. You can't really say
that one has had a healthier upbringing; they might have had an equally
healthy upbringing, but they have different genes, which is (according to
them) the biggest deciding factor for adult stature. If one of them is 5%
taller, how can you know, without any more information, that that 5% isn't all
because of genes? In fact, maybe the shorter person has had a healthy
upbringing and, so to speak, achieved his full stature potential, while the
taller person has had a relatively bad childhood and not really met his
tallness potential with regards to his genetic make-up.

~~~
muyuu
It's taking a symptom and turning to it as a goal.

Not everything that makes you taller is healthy. Eating a lot of poultry that
had been stuffed in growth hormones has been proven to increase growth. We can
theoretically push growth at all means, doing things that we know are
unhealthy. There's no proof that a diet that will make you the tallest will
necessarily be the healthiest for you.

Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that the
more height you manage to get, the better. There's absolutely no scientific
evidence to this. It's true that malnourishment will impede your growth, but
that's just an extreme case.

Seems like current Japan - for instance - is very healthy, has the longest
life expectancy, but they are on the short side compared to Europe or North
America.

I'm much taller than average and I'm quite sure that this isn't an advantage
at all, except for specific tasks or sports. A lot more often it's a problem
and I don't feel one bit superior to shorter people. There's a lot of bias
towards "taller is better" regardless of any other consideration. It stops
just short of eugenics to achieve taller people.

~~~
Dewie
> Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that
> the more height you manage to get, the better.

You're right. I didn't intend to imply that. Just because someone has achieved
their "potential", ie. have grown as tall as one might expect them to based on
their genes, does not necessarily mean that it was _good_ that they did so.
Maybe they would have been better off health-wise if they grew shorter than
that; what height would be optimal (or: what percentage of their """""height
potential""""") would be hard to guess, I reckon.

~~~
muyuu
You still seem to imply that there is a maximum height potential, and getting
closer to it, is better.

This just seems to be a very inaccurate model.

All accounts point to the fact that there is a whole range of heights that you
can achieve while living a perfectly healthy lifestyle and nutrition, and that
you can fail to reach this range, or _exceed_ it, by excess or defect of some
elements in your lifestyle and nutrition. You can even stay within this range
while being unhealthy because height is by no means a perfect or even a good
measure of health. It's a very loose measure only in rather extreme
situations, and a decent measure for whole populations under some
circumstances. It is a proven fact that you can _unhealthily push someone 's
growth during childhood_.

Completeness of nutrition is mostly a non-factor across the Western World when
it comes to height. Exercise is a bigger factor as many kids slow down their
metabolism by lack of exercise. Migration of Mexicans and Asians into the US
is a bigger factor too. These people are healthy, they are just typically
shorter. There is no problem at all with that in itself.

Albert Einstein was average Ashkenazi jewish at 5 ft 8~9. Nikola Tesla was
your typical tall Balkan man (some accounts measured him at up to 6 ft 6).
Does it matter? Should we be trying to push up the height of the jewish by
eugenics? The whole "worry" is silly.

Malnourishment also leads to lower weight. Do we try to maximise weight? no,
right? because we realise it's stupid and it's quite evident that excess of
weight is not good, and it doesn't even look good in most cultures currently.
In fact there's a cultural trend about being unnaturally "lean". People need
to immediately stop mixing up their personal aesthetic preferences, however
common, with real issues like science and health.

~~~
Dewie
> You still seem to imply that there is a maximum height potential, and
> getting closer to it, is better.

Oh please. I spent that entire post explaining that that is not my intention.
The problem is probably my use of the word "potential", which has _positive_
connotations, generally. I intend it to mean just _possibility_. Clearly,
there are a lot of cases where this _potential_ can manifest themselves as
opposite extremes, and where there is no clear objective _goodness_ of falling
on either end of the extremes. In other cases, it may be totally subjective.
In other cases, yet, it may not matter. I think, given extreme circumstances,
people in general have the potential in them for great evil. But clearly, that
is not _good_ or _desirable_. I should have clarified from the beginning my
use of the word _desirable_. But it is _you_ who chose to cling to it (if I'm
right in that being the problematic word).

Stop projecting the issues# you have with the tallness-worship of our/some
cultures onto me!

#by which I mean protests, intellectual arguments against the practice, etc. I
don't mean to imply that you have some emotional _issue_ with this kind of
thing. See? I ran out of accurate words so I had to resort to a word with too
much semantic baggage.

~~~
muyuu
I don't think you have read my post completely. I didn't imply anything from
the usage of the word potential.

You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be _taller_ as the direct
result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.

Maybe by making this post shorter you won't miss that particular point.

~~~
Dewie
> I don't think you have read my post completely. I didn't imply anything from
> the usage of the word potential.

I meant _my_ use of that word. I edited my post to make that clear. Or maybe
you mean that _you_ mentioning the my use of the word "potential" had no such
interpretation (positive) of the "potential", in which case... my head hurts
now.

> You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be taller as the direct
> result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.

By what criteria have I missed this fact? By not mentioning it, or by trying
to contradict it? I said, and I quote myself since you don't seem to trust me:
"Just because someone has achieved their "potential" [...], does not
necessarily mean that it was good that they did so.". In that context, "bad"
meant that the tallness was due to some unhealthy habits, since we were on the
topic of nutrition and health and so on. Or that them being that tall was not
good for them in their adult life, or both.

I am used to people assuming dishonesty in online debates. But not when I
agree with them to begin with. If what you intend to do is to find some
wording that betrays a (subconscious) bias towards tall people, please give it
a rest and find someone else to take it out on.

------
SoftwareMaven
We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1].
Agriculture allowed us to feed many more people, but it came at a _terrible_
price on human health.

And the fact that the article says we are taller now than we have ever been in
history, which is patently _not_ true, casts a serious level of doubt on the
article.

1\. [http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-
our...](http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-our-species-
first-appeared)

~~~
ama729
> We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1]

Yes we do, there are a number of countries where the average height is close
to 183 cm (average in your article, though there are no citations given for
that fact): The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, ... In the Dinaric Alps,
it even reach 186 cm, so in fact we ARE taller today[1].

But another article[2] with actual sources point to an 176.2 cm average, much
smaller than today.

> but it came at a terrible price on human health

[Citation needed]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_around_the_world)

[2]
[http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.h...](http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.htm)

~~~
Retric
Comparing a world wide average with a relatively tiny sub population is hardly
reasonable. Otherwise we could just look at the average height of NBA players
and say that's a reasonable proxy for the US average height.

~~~
ama729
Cro-magnon specifically refer to early human living in Europe, seems fair to
make the comparison.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-
Magnon)

~~~
Retric
Edit: Perhaps if you wanted to compare the average for all of Europe to
estimates of _European_ Early Modern Humans that might be reasonable, however
that's not what you did.

They where discovered in Europe, but the current theory is they did not
originate in Europe note the direct link from that Wikipedia page:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Cro-
Magno...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Cro-
Magnon_range_35%2C000_ybp.svg)

"The term "Cro-Magnon" soon came to be used in a general sense to describe the
oldest modern people in Europe. ... _However, analyses based on more current
data[8] concerning the migrations of early humans have contributed to a
refined definition of this expression._ Current scientific literature prefers
the term "European Early Modern Humans" (or EEMH), instead of "Cro-Magnon".
The oldest definitely dated EEMH specimen is the Grotta del Cavallo tooth
dated in 2011 to at least 43,000 years old."

Note: "the term 'Cro-Magnon,' which has no formal taxonomic status" current
evidence suggests they where effectively genetically identical to modern
humans. Their diet was simply better leading to larger growth vs any
significant DNA differences.

