This was an interesting article on the first
read, as I was thinking about it I had to go back and take a look again.
This article (roughly) equates average national
height with health care, nutrition, stuff like that.
They use the date of 1970 as when the height
'shifted' to somewhere else, I wonder how that
date correlates with the widespread use of processed food in the USA?
>>Height has long been considered a pretty good
measure of society's health and prosperity. A
nation of tall people, the thinking goes,
reflects a high standard of living. Food is
abundant. Health care is broadly available, particularly for children.
Americans long enjoyed this kind of elevated
status. For centuries, we were the tallest people
in the world, on average. At the time of the
Revolutionary War, the typical American colonist
was 2 inches taller than the Englishman he was
fighting. By 1850, the difference was 3 inches.
The gap grew through much of the early 20th century.
The Dutch are now the tallest people in the
world, according to recent studies. Americans
have shrunk, relatively speaking. American men
now rank ninth in the world in average height;
females rank 15th. The average young Dutch male
is slightly above 6 feet tall; the average
American male is 5-foot-10. (Women tend to
average about 5 inches shorter than men.)
American men are now generally shorter than
Danes, Swedes, Czechs, Norwegians, Germans,
Belgians and Canadians. They remain slightly
taller than the English (by three-quarters of an
inch) and the French (by eight-tenths of an inch).
It's hard to argue the point. Many Americans
appear to survive substantially on fast food,
which is notoriously rich in sugar and fat but
deficient in overall nutrition. In 1970 around
the time the Netherlands actually surpassed the
United States in average height Americans spent
about $6 billion annually on fast food. In 2004, the total was $148.6 billion.<<