(Newswire.net — July 29, 2016) —The researchers analyzed a century’s worth of height data from 200 countries. The survey published in eLife magazine shows that the tallest people are from the Netherlands and Latvia.
Dutch men are on average 6 feet in height, and women from Latvia are on average 5 foot 6 inches. The researchers looked at the average height of 18 year olds,roughly the age when people stop growing.
They drew on more than 1,400 studies that covered more than 18.6 million adults who reached the age of 18 between 1914 and 2014.
The next nine tallest countries in order for men were Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Iceland and the Czech Republic.
On the female list, after the tallest ladies from Latvia, come women from the Netherlands, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovakia, Denmark, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
Americans, third and fourth in 1914, dropped to 37th for men and 42nd place for women, researchers said.
In the U.S., men have increased in height of about two and a half inches over the century.
According to the survey, their opposite, the shortest men, are from Eastern Timor, with an average height of five feet, and the shortest women from Guatemala, with an average height of 4 foot 5 inches.
The researchers rated the average height for U.S. 18 year olds as a maximum of about 5 foot 10 inches for men in 1996, and about 5 foot 5 inches for women in 1988. One of the study’s authors, James Bentham of Imperial College London, explained that since 1988 height has stalled but not decreased significantly.
The researchers have not investigated the cause of the U.S. stagnation, but Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, who led the research, said national height averages are useful as an indicator of nutrition, health care, environment and general health that people have experienced from the womb through adolescence.
Experts have added that genes influence height.