From The Guardian, September 17:
Poorer diet may explain why the lofty lowlanders are at least 1cm shorter than the previous generation
It is, perhaps, with just a hint of satisfaction that the Dutch office for national statistics has confirmed that the men and women of the Netherlands remain the tallest people on the planet. But the government’s statisticians have had cause to report a further potentially humbling twist: the Dutch are shrinking.
For the last six decades, the people of the lowlands have stood imperiously at the top of the world height league table, with the latest data suggesting the average 19-year-old man stood at just over 6ft tall (182.9cm) in 2020, while women born in the same year measured in at 5ft 6 in (169.3cm).
The finding by the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS), a government institution, means the Netherlands maintains its lofty spot, which it has held since 1958, excusing a blip in 1967 when the men born that year came in at a miserable second place in the rankings.
But based on surveys of 719,000 people aged 19 to 60, the CBS has had to report that after a period of stagnation and now clear contraction, Dutch men born in 2001 are on average 1cm shorter than the generation born in the Netherlands in 1980, and Dutch women are 1.4cm smaller. And further analysis suggests it cannot all be explained by people coming into the Netherlands from other countries.
“The decrease is partly related to the increased immigration of shorter new population groups and the children born from these populations in the Netherlands,” the government statisticians explained.
“But growth also stagnated in the generations in which both parents were born in the Netherlands, and in the generations in which all four grandparents were born in the Netherlands. Men without a migration background did not get any taller and women without a migration background show a downward trend.”
Scientists have been quick to offer possible explanations, and even remedial solutions to the country’s height crisis....
....MUCH MORE
Somebody might want to check and see what this guy is up to:
Five ways a bioethicist wants to change our bodies to fight climate change
....3. Hobbit people
Screening embryos so that we have smaller babies. Why will that help us fight climate change? Liao says smaller people use less resources. “We need more fabric to clothe them, and it takes more energy to transport them,” he says. “Add all that up. This could impact our consumption of food, the production of the vehicles and buildings we use, and even the energy to heat those buildings. Liao says as a species we’re taller than we have ever been, and that we don’t actually need to be. So we should use our selective powers to stay short.....
