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.<p>Edit: added some extra text to help quantify the difference I see.
"Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, lower risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and higher risk of some cancers"<p>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.<p><a href="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" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...</a><p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/</a><p>More balanced:<p><a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094385" rel="nofollow">http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....</a>
American men were third tallest in 1914 and 37th tallest in 2014.<p>The growth in the height of American men is the same as Mali, and similar to Burkina Faso. Senegal did better.<p>Shouldn't the world's richest nation be doing better?<p>PS There's a story that's easier to read at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/26/tall-story-men-and-women-have-grown-taller-over-last-century-study-shows" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/26/tall-story-m...</a><p>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."<p>(1) co-author of the research from Imperial College, London
>Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity<p>I thought most researched suggested the opposite (ex <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/</a>)
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" <a href="http://www.gwern.net/genetics/docs/genetics/2015-robinson.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.gwern.net/genetics/docs/genetics/2015-robinson.pd...</a> , 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.
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.<p>/rant
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.
Interactive versions of the data visualizations are available on the NCD RisC website:<p><a href="http://www.ncdrisc.org/v-height.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncdrisc.org/v-height.html</a>
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.
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.
Interesting.<p>I read previously that tallness is fairly dependent on good nutrition, which would correlate with overall increase in welfare/quality of life.