You mean those giants I saw there weren’t just windmills?
I always wondered about that too. I am of 100% American Southern descent with deep English, Scottish and some Scandinavian roots. I am either 6’1" or 6"2 depending on the time of day that you measure me. I have always been slightly taller than average but it wasn’t really notable until I moved to the Northeast. I feel like an absolute giant compared to most people here no matter where their ancestors came from (largeky Southern European). However, even the English, Irish and black people aren’t nearly as big as they are in the South. Every time I go back home, I am immediately struck by the fact that I am far from the tallest person around for the first time in a long time. Some of them are just fat and moderately tall but certainly not all of them. The younger males, both black and white just tend to be unusually big compared to people in Boston or NYC.
I have heard the dietary explanation but it seems incomplete to me. We didn’t eat especially nutritiously when I was growing up but we still grew a nice crop of extremely tall and statuesque people from several different ethnic groups. Only the recent hispanic and Asian immigrants were small as a whole.
I would also love to see stats on height differences among different ethnic groups in the U.S. and exactly where they are coming from because it may help answer the question much better.
Nah. The Netherlands are below sea level. It’s survival of the tallest - all the short ones drowned.
Easier to get more oxygen in the lungs at below sea level where the air is so dense. Good nutrition.
Uh, what?
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Mexicans are the single largest Latino group, and they have more European than native heritage, though of course they’re much more indigenous than Anglo-Americans are.
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Mexican and northern Central American civilization was notorious for having severe deficiencies of meat and protein. They had game, of course, but they didn’t have domestic animals with the exception of dogs, Muscovy ducks and turkeys. Their main staple grain, corn, was also poorer in protein than the biggest European staple, wheat.
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Do you have any citations that native American peoples (with the exception of Tierra del Fuegians, who have nothing to do with modern Latino immigration) were taller than white Europeans? Sounds doubtful to me at least as regards Mexico & Central America. (My understanding is that Peruvian Incas were quite well nourished- they had llamas and guinea pigs and lived next to one of the world’s richest ocean fisheries- so they may have been taller than the Spanish).
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I would guess, personally, that the reasons Mexicans and other Latinos are relatively short has to do with genetics (both on the southern European side, and on the native American side). It’s late now, but I’ll look for citations tomorrow.
Fridgemagnet writes:
> 1) Dutch men are the tallest in Europe, but British women are taller than Dutch
> women on average.
Not true. You can see this in the following link. Both Dutch men and women are taller than British men and women. It appears to me that the difference between men’s and women’s height is about the same percentage in each country:
Living in Holland, it seems to me that women have been getting shorter the past few decades. Which would be easily explained by girls hitting puberty earlier and earlier.
Whenever I’m in America I’m always surprised to see how tiny many American women are, while the men are only slightly shorter than what I’d call average.
I’ve been married to the OP for three years (well, a little later this year), and met him a few years before that – this thread is older than our relationship.
Shall I go downstairs and let him know that it’s walking among the living? 
Wilt Chamberlain spent a week in the Netherlands back in 1975 and the effects are still noticeable.
iljitsch writes:
> Whenever I’m in America I’m always surprised to see how tiny many American
> women are, while the men are only slightly shorter than what I’d call average.
Not true. Dutch men are 9.5% taller than Dutch women on average, and American men are 8.6% taller than American women on average, as you can see in the chart I linked to. Really, it’s almost impossible for a person to make an accurate statement about average heights in a country. It’s too easy to be swayed by your local observations. Furthermore, I suspect that the way height is inherited that there’s no way that the percentage by which men tend to be taller than women could differ by much.
Little Nemo writes:
> Wilt Chamberlain spent a week in the Netherlands back in 1975 and the effects are
> still noticeable.
The effects being what - that twenty-four years later he died?
Never heard of those diseases. What’s the cure for Taino?
How?
In an autobio Chamberlain claimed to have slept with 20,000 women in his life, which would have meant 500 per year from ages 15-55, over 1 per day. Perhaps while in the Neth. Chamberlain took advantage of the healthy local diet to increase his powers of endurance, and took advantage of the legal pot and high alcohol consumption to find women, many, many women whose reluctant side had been diminished.
Heh… replying to my own 9 year old thread- strange!
Anyway, in the intervening time, I’ve actually been to Europe some 3 more times, including the Netherlands, and I didn’t feel particularly short or tall there- most men were somewhere around my height, and there weren’t any more 6’4" or 5’8" men than there are here. FWIW I’ve never felt particularly tall or short when I’ve visited the UK either.
I suspect that the Dutch and British height distributions and the US white male height distributions are all pretty similar, and that the US average height is skewed by immigrant groups.
It’s a little thing we like to call a joke.
Here is the background information you will need:
- Wilt Chamberlain was a basketball player.
- Basketball players are generally tall.
- Height is often a genetic trait.
- Wilt Chamberlain had a reputation for having lots of sexual encounters.
So the joke is that Wilt Chamberlain visited the Netherlands once several years ago, had sex with a bunch of the local women, and passed on his genes making the current population taller than average.
This is obviously an exaggeration for comedic effect - in reality, no individual person could cause a noticeable effect in an entire country’s gene pool.
Now that I have explained the joke, the appropriate response is to chuckle, laugh, or guffaw depending on your degree of appreciation.
According to the averages, I am taller than the average woman across the board (yay me!). I am mostly Dutch, with some Scots and French thrown in - my daughter is already over 5’2" and is turning 12. We are all hoping she gets to 5’11". 
Um, to keep their heads above water? 
J.
Dang! Ninja’d by Askance: “Nah. The Netherlands are below sea level. It’s survival of the tallest - all the short ones drowned.”
zombie or no
they had to be to get that shovelful of dirt to the top of the dike.
I know the Dutch are supposed to be the tallest now but for a long time weren’t they known to be shorter than most other European men going a few hundred years back? Also I believe tall people on average die earlier so maybe it’s an unenviable position to be in, I wonder if this will hold true for the Dutch.
Maybe their AG department has mandated doubling up on the growth hormone and steroids their giving to the meat and dairy livestock.