Have you ever wondered why the guillotine became a popular tool of execution during the French Revolution?
Having exploited the peasants and lower classes for decades, the French aristocracy was towering above them in stature and not just in status. Inferior nutrition and health conditions had reduced the average height of the non-privileged French, while the elites enjoyed better health, food, and living conditions.
You could measure the significant difference.
If you exclude the elite few, Americans haven't grown taller in fifty years. (And no, it's not because of immigration - these American height averages do not include immigrants from Mexico or China.)
Yes, the people that rose in revolt in France chose the guillotine because it cut the aristocracy down in size. Efficiently chopping off the visible affront that the elites represented to the downtrodden poor.
As short a time ago as between the world wars, Americans were on average taller than the average European. That is no longer true.
Today's European enjoys the height advantage that Americans used to enjoy - a full three to four inches, depending upon the European nation you measure against. Meanwhile, Americans have on average stagnated or even regressed in height.
Back in 2005, the height gap was talked about briefly, following an article in The New Yorker.
In this article, several interesting height statistics were presented. Among them the fact that in the course of less than 150 years, the Dutch have gone from being among the shortest peoples in Europe to the tallest.
Burkhard Bilger, who wrote the New Yorker article, had been given free reins by the magazine as far as resources were concerned, and made a comprehensive survey of the subject. He introduces us to the importance of height as a measure of population health, as this is viewed by anthropometric historians:
Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives.
Bilger then tells the story of the Hungarian John Komlos, considered a leading researcher in the field of anthropometrics. Komlos is himself living proof of the reduced height that will result if you are deprived of food and shelter during childhood and adolescence - he was born in 1944, and remained in a Hungary that suffered deprivations until his family managed to leave in 1956, during the revolution.
Komlos' family came to the USA, a land that struck them with its "mythical abundance."
Biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. Any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. ("Iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen I.Q. points," one nutritionist told me.) Komlos was twelve years old when he left Hungary, and he had been malnourished most of his life.
For most of the 19th century, Americans had towered over Europeans - in fact, Americans were on average four inches taller than the Dutch during that period!
Why did the Dutch overtake the Americans in height?
Komlos now knows that he arrived in America at a pivotal point in its history. Over the next fifty years, by most indicators dear to economists, the country remained the richest in the world. But by another set of numbers—longevity and income inequality—it began to lag behind Northern Europe and Japan. It’s this shift that fascinates Komlos, and that emerges so vividly in his height data.
The cue is "income inequality."
You'd be wrong to suppose that humans have grown ever taller during their history. Height varies with access to food, shelter and health care.
Europeans grew taller up until 800AD, and then saw a regression in average heights as people were moved into urban milieus. Sustenance became scarcer for the majority of the population, while the elites had enough - something that would lead to the popularity of the guillotine as a leveller at the end of the 18th century. Says the economist Robert Fogel, in Bilger's article: "The people who stormed the Bastille didn't look like Errol Flynn. They looked like thirteen-year-old girls."
Heights have increased again, but they have done so where there's been abundance (as in the USA during the 19th century), or where income equality and access to equitable health care increased.
And this is why today's Dutch tower above the average American.
Komlos, the Nobel Prize winner Fogel and others have all contributed to a better understanding of the importance of anthropometric research in assessing the health and vitality of the inhabitants of various nations.
During the Civil War, average heights decreased, which is common in times of deprivation. It's quite astonishing how fast the human body will respond to changes in nutrition, as you will see for yourself if you read Bilger's article. By the end of the 19th century, America was on track again, and average height was rising - because of public hygiene campaigns and the expansion of the economy, urbanites also outgrew farmers for the first time.
Then, as Komlos states, something strange happened. While Europeans continued to grow, the U.S. just went flat. During WWI, the average American was two inches taller than his German counterpart, but sometime around 1955, the situation became reversed.
Americans haven't grown taller in fifty years - while Europeans have been adding two centimeters per decade in the same period. Northern Europeans are on average three inches taller than the average American, and the difference is increasing. (And no, it's not because of immigration - these American height averages do not include immigrants from Mexico or China.)
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.
The Dutch professor of economic history J.W. Drukker is confident he has the answer to why the Dutch have become the tallest people in Europe, while Americans have regressed in height.
Before 1850, the country (Holland) grew rich off its colonies, but the wealth stayed in the hands of the wealthy, and the average citizen shrank. After 1850, height and income suddenly fell into lockstep: when incomes went up, heights went up (after a predictable lag time), and always to the same degree. "I thought I must have made an error," Drukker said. "I must have correlated one of the variables with itself."
In Holland, when the G.N.P. grows, everyone grows. How come this doesn't happen in the U.S.A., the world's richest country?
As America’s rich and poor drift further apart, its growth curve may be headed in the opposite direction, Komlos and others say. The eight million Americans without a job, the forty million without health insurance, the thirty-five million who live below the poverty line are surely having trouble measuring up. And they’re not alone. As more and more Americans turn to a fast-food diet, its effects may be creeping up the social ladder, so that even the wealthy are growing wider rather than taller.
If you ever wanted a reason why Health Care Reform is important, this should be a good one.
The Dwarfing of America is taking place every single day, and to anthropometric researchers, the cause in no mystery. As Richard Steckel, a graduate student of Fogel's, disovered:
... 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.
Tell that to the HCR-holdouts in Congress: Americans haven't grown taller in fifty years.
(And no, it's not because of immigration - these American height averages do not include immigrants from Mexico or China.)
Research paper dealing with the subject, by John Komlos and Benjamin E. Lauderdale:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/...
PDF of same: http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/...