No – that’s not a typo…on a site like this, you’d think that weight and health would be more heavily stressed (no pun intended), but – as it turns out – height is important too - at least as an indicator of our health as a society.

…Americans have a similar height gap to worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly reported that Americans are, quite literally, falling short of Europeans. In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.

The height gap between Americans and Northern Europeans can’t be explained by an influx of short immigrants. Experts say the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity, and the height statistics cited in the article include only English-speaking native-born Americans, and don’t include people of Asian and Hispanic descent.

The real answer may be that Northern European countries do a better job of spreading the wealth and taking care of their children…researchers have found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, “which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teenage eating habits.”

As researchers John Komlos and Benjamin Lauderdale put it in their original paper:

“Because physical growth is a function of net nutritional status before adulthood, which, in turn depends on nutritional supply on the one hand and disease encounters on the other, we conjecture that the differences between American and European physical stature can be attributed primarily to these two factors (Tanner, 1978).22 Why American heights declined in relative terms remains a conundrum, a topic for future research, but even at this stage of our knowledge we can conjecture that there are differences in the diet of US and European children that could effect human growth. For example, American children might consume more meals prepared outside of the home, more fast food rich in fat, high in energy density and low in essential micronutrients, than European children.”

The long and the short of it (sorry!) is that poor nutritional habits seen in America’s young people are being reflected by an increase in weight/body fat, AND also by a general decrease in height.  It’s one more indication that we’re literally shortchanging our children’s futures by feeding them too many - and too many empty – calories. 

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