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Short North Koreans . . . and Americans

Tara Parker-Pope
September 29, 2008, 7:12 am

During the first presidential debate, Senator John McCain called North Korea a “repressive brutal regime,” comparing life there to living in a prison camp. And then he summoned a bizarre statistic, saying that the average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean.

Mr. McCain is correct that there appears to be a growing gap in height between North and South Koreans, likely due to poor nutrition and impoverished living conditions. Studies of escapees from North Korea show that those born after the partitioning of the Korean Peninsula in the North were consistently about two inches shorter than their counterparts in the South, according to a 2004 report in Economics and Human Biology [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B73DX-4DV1HK2-1/2/c32b4d9d0cec7646cb0089748e15099d ].

While the conditions for North Koreans are troubling, Americans have a similar height gap to worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly [ http://ideas.repec.org/p/lmu/muenec/1241.html ] reported that Americans are, quite literally, falling short of Europeans. In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.

The height gap between Americans and Northern Europeans can’t be explained by an influx of short immigrants. Experts say the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity, and the height statistics cited in the article include only English-speaking native-born Americans, and don’t include people of Asian and Hispanic descent.

The real answer may be that Northern European countries do a better job of spreading the wealth and taking care of their children.

“We conjecture that perhaps the Western and Northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy,” wrote John Komlos, professor of economics at the University of Munich.

I e-mailed Dr. Komlos to ask him if he had seen the reference to short North Koreans in the debate. He said he found Senator McCain’s remark “amusing” as he is the editor of the science journal that originally published the data.

“Of course, a similar argument could be leveled against the U.S. as it is not doing as well as its Western European counterparts,” he wrote. “Of course there are many other indicators that the U.S. health care and diet are not as good as in Western Europe. Western Europeans live longer.”

What do height trends say about the health of a nation? New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger explored the issue in a fascinating 2004 article called “The Height Gap.”

Over the past 30 years, a new breed of “anthropometric historians” has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health care coverage. In our height lies our history.

Just like with the North Koreans and South Koreans, the height gap between Americans and Europeans is a relatively new development. The New Yorker article notes that the average American soldier during World War I was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955, the data began to shift. The Germans and other Europeans grew an extra two centimeters a decade, or a little under an inch, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in 50 years.

According to Mr. Bilger, researchers have found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, “which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teenage eating habits.”

As America’s rich and poor drift further apart, its growth curve may be headed in the opposite direction…. The eight million Americans without a job, the 40 million without health insurance, the 35 million who live below the poverty line are surely having trouble measuring up. And they’re not alone. As more and more Americans turn to a fast-food diet, its effects may be creeping up the social ladder, so that even the wealthy are growing wider rather than taller.

To read the full (and lengthy) New Yorker article, click here [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?currentPage=1 (my next post, a reply to this post)]. And read New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s take on the topic in “America Comes Up Short [ http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/opinion/15krugman.html (my next one after that)].”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/short-north-koreans-and-americans/ [with comments]