Why are the Dutch Growing Taller Than the Rest of the World?

DUTCH men are towering over their global rivals by growing at the fastest rate in the world – but why?

The average male in the Netherlands has gained 20cm in height over the last 150 years, according to military records.

In comparison, the height of the average American has risen only 6cm in the same timeframe.

The reason may be down to taller Dutch men producing MORE children than their shorter counterparts - meaning the tall gene is being rapidly passed down through generations.

According to a snapshot of the last three-decades, the most fertile men were those above the average male height in the Netherlands.

Statistically, tall men are having 0.24 more children on average than the last fertile men, who were about 14cm below the average height.

Natural selection in addition to good environmental conditions may help explain why the Dutch are so tall Taller women also reproduced more in the Netherlands, compared to counterparts in other countries.

The study, led by Gert Stulp, was based on the lives and health of more than 94,500 people who lived in the northern Netherlands from 1935 to 1967.

While it did not involve genetic testing, researchers concluded from observations that natural selection must have a part to play.

Other explanations have claimed the Dutch are so tall due to a diet rich in meat and dairy.

"Natural selection in addition to good environmental conditions may help explain why the Dutch are so tall," said the study, which was published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

Mr Stulp, a specialist in population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP: "Height is very heritable — taller parents tend to have somewhat taller children than shorter parents."

"Because taller individuals would have more offspring in the next generation who would be taller, the average height in that generation would a bit taller on average than the preceding generation, if all else is equal."

The average height of men in the Netherlands currently stands at 6ft, while the average woman is almost 5ft 6ins tall.

This one from the New Yorker, over 10 years ago has some nice backstory.

'The immediate point was clear: America was a good place to live in the eighteenth century. Game was abundant, land free for the clearing, settlement sparse enough to prevent epidemics. On Komlos’s graph, even the runaway slaves are five feet eight, and white colonists are five feet nine—a full three inches taller than the average European of the time. “So this is the eighteenth century,” Komlos said, slapping the files. “This is not problematic. It shows that Americans are well nourished. Terrific.” He reached into a cardboard folder and pulled out another series of graphs. “What is problematic is what comes next.”

Around the time of the Civil War, Americans’ heights predictably decreased: Union soldiers dropped from sixty-eight to sixty-seven inches in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, and similar patterns held for West Point cadets, Amherst students, and free blacks in Maryland and Virginia. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.

Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.

The average American man is only five feet nine and a half—less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.'

The massive immigration from Mexico and Latin America has an impact. 80% of all population growth is due to immigration.

I’ve been to The Nethlands many times and almost all the ethnic Dutch are taller than I am. I’m six feet tall and it is the first thing I notice. Even adolescent girls are approaching six feet tall. Crazy.

Then I go to Paris and the first thing I notice is that I’m taller than everyone on the subway car by almost a head height, and usually two. Sometimes three, even. Except for the French-African guy probably from Senegal a few rows over who is almost as tall as I am when he’s sitting down. A pretty tall Frenchman is five foot six, but up in Normandy the people seem lots taller. France and Japan seem to share the same average height.

England is full of tall people too.

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