A 100-year global study by scientists at Imperial College London published in the journal eLife revealed that the world’s tallest men are the Dutch.
Average Dutch man stands 6 feet. In the last 150 years, the average height of Dutch men has increased by 8 inches. The average American man has only grown 2.7 inches.
For years, scientists have been trying to figure out why. Now researchers have found evidence that natural selection may be a factor. In other words, in the Netherlands, taller people had more children.
Dutch researcher Gert Stulp, who lead the study on height and fertility, is 6 foot 7 inches tall himself.
“We found that men who were taller than average had a higher fertility than those that were shorter,” researcher Gert Stulp told As It Happens host Carol Off. “And we also found that, in women, those of average height had slightly higher fertility.”
Stulp and his team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered this by mining data from a large database of information about people living in the northern Netherlands from 1935 to 1967.
In the United States, the pattern was strikingly different. It was shorter women and average height men who had the highest fertility.
There is no concrete explanation for why taller Dutch people have more children. But Stulp has a few guesses.
“One reason might be that, for some reason, Dutch value height a little bit more in their partner,” he says. “Height may also be associated to variables like health and income a little bit more strongly in the Netherlands or the United States.”
The same study found that Iranian men and South Korean women have grown the fastest in the last century, according to the largest ever study of height around the world. Americans, once among the world’s tallest people, have dropped from having men and women at 3rd and 4th in the global height rankings a 100 years earlier, to placing 37th and 42nd respectively in 2014.
