The Hindu : International : Junk food shrinks Americans

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 04, 2004

International

International

Junk food shrinks Americans

WASHINGTON, APRIL 3 . Researchers have made a startling discovery: Americans are shrinking. A nation once famed for its strapping, well-nourished youth is gradually diminishing in physical stature.

By contrast, the heights of men and women from Europe are increasing inexorably. The average Dutchman, whose country produces the Continent's loftiest men, is now more than six feet tall — almost two inches above his American counterpart. And he is still growing.

Across the Netherlands hotel owners are lengthening beds and raising door mantles to stop the nation's tall youth suffering from irreparable anatomical damage.

According to a New Yorker essay on the subject last week, Dutch ambulances are even having to keep their back doors open on many occasions to allow for the prodigious dimensions of their patients' legs.

New research has shown some unexpected disparities between statures of Americans and Europeans, indicating that recent social changes and diet are major influences on adult height.

For British men, too, are outstripping their transatlantic rivals.

At the time of the American Revolution, the average U.S. male was two inches taller than his British counterpart. Today he is almost half an inch shorter.

This surprising reappraisal of American and European physiques is the work of researcher John Komlos of Munich University.

`Much of the difference is due to the great social inequality that now exists in the United States,' Mr. Komlos said last week. `In Europe, there is — in most countries — good health service provision for most members of society and plenty of protein in most people's diets. As a result, children do not suffer illnesses that would blight their growth or suffer problems of malnutrition. For that reason, we have continued to grow and grow.'

On the other hand, America has eight million people with no job, 40 million individuals with no health insurance, 35 million living below the poverty line, and a population that exists mainly on junk food. There, the rise in average height that marked its progress as a nation through the 19th and 20th centuries has stopped and has actually reversed — albeit very slightly — in recent years.

Many Americans are rich and do well anatomically as a result, but there is a large underclass that is starting to drag the country down the stature charts.

This discovery, which has been revealed through research that Mr. Komlos has assembled over decades, amounts to an assault on the values of the free market economy espoused by Americans and provides powerful support for those who back European ideas about universal healthcare.

Fluctuations in human stature are not new and have occurred regularly throughout history.

Our early hunter-gatherer ancestors were tall and lean. Later, as farming spread across the world, dense populations learnt to live on only a few standard crops and suffered considerable nutritional neglect. The result was a decline in stature. —

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