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Height gains no more for Dutch

AMSTERDAM: Height increases for the Dutch, thought to be the world’s tallest people, have tapered off since the turn of the century, the country’s statistics agency said Monday.

“The adult man in the Netherlands has scarcely grown since 2001,” the Central Bureau for Statistics said. “There is a slowdown in the growth of women, too.”

The height of the average Dutch man increased by more than 3 cm from the start of the 1980s to above 180 cm in 2000. But since then, the increase has been marginal and adult men in 2006 were 181 cm, the agency said. Adult women were 168 cm.

The agency used numbers gathered from its annual health poll of around 10,000 people. Both men and women tend to exaggerate their height, and the agency adjusted numbers downward to reflect overstatements observed in earlier studies by health authorities.

Several international surveys have found the Dutch to be the world’s tallest, most recently a paper published in the Annals of Human Biology co-authored by professors from Princeton and the University of Munich. — AP

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