Dutch men confirmed as world’s tallest
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When it comes to height, Dutch men and Latvian women tower over all other nationalities, a new study confirms.
The average Dutchman is now 183cm (6ft) tall, while the average Latvian woman reaches 170cm (5ft 7in).
The research, published in the journal eLife, has tracked growth trends in 187 countries since 1914.
It finds Iranian men and South Korean women have had the biggest spurts, increasing their height by an average of more than 16cm (6in) and 20cm (8in).
In the UK, the sexes have gone up virtually in parallel by about 11cm (4in). “Mr Average” in Britain is now 178cm (5ft 10in) tall; Ms Average stands at 164cm (5ft 5in).
This contrasts for example with men and women in the US, where the height of the nation’s people started to plateau in the 1960s and 1970s. Over the century, they have seen increases of just 6cm and 5cm (a couple of inches), respectively.
Indeed, Americans have tumbled down the rankings. Back in 1914, they had the third tallest men and fourth tallest women on the planet. Today they are in 37th and 42nd place.
The height charts are now utterly dominated by European countries, but the data would suggest that growth trends in general in the West have largely levelled out.
The smallest men on the planet are to be found in East Timor (160cm; 5ft 3in).
The world’s smallest women are in Guatemala, a status they also held back in 1914. According to the survey data, a century ago the average Guatemalan 18-year-old female was 140cm (4ft 7in). Today she has still not quite reached 150cm (4ft 11in).
East Asia has seen some of the biggest increases. People in Japan, China and South Korea are much taller than they were 100 years ago.
“The parts of the world where people haven’t got particularly taller over this 100 years of analysis are in South Asia (such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and in sub-Saharan Africa. Here the increase in height is between 1-6cm in those regions,” explained co-author James Bentham from Imperial College London.
In fact, in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, average heights have actually fallen since the 1970s. Nations like Uganda and Sierra Leone have seen a few centimetres come off the height of the average man.
Some of the variation in height across the globe can be explained by genetics, but the study’s authors say our DNA cannot be the dominant factor.
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