The Connection Between Height and Health
Height has historically been regarded as a marker of health and robustness. We seem to implicitly accept that bigger is indeed better, even if we don’t want to admit it. On average, tall people attain more professional success and make more money, the taller presidential candidate almost always wins, and women are more attracted to tall men. On a very visceral level, the taller person is more physically imposing. After all, who would you rather fight – the dude with a long reach raining punches from up high or the shorter guy with stubby arms who has to work his way inside your guard (although Mike Tyson did pretty well for himself with such “limitations”)? And on that note, who would you prefer as a mate – the physically imposing specimen or the shorter, presumably weaker male?
We in the Primal health community are quick to point out that agriculture reduced physical stature. Generally speaking, bone records indicate that Paleolithic (and, to a lesser extent, Mesolithic) humans were taller than humans living immediately after the advent of agriculture. Multiple sources exist, so let’s take a look at a couple of them before moving on:
According to one study on remains of early Europeans, prior to 16,000 BC, European males stood 179 cm tall, or 5’10.5″, and females stood 158 cm, or 5’2″. Between 8,000 to 6,600 BC, average heights had dropped to 166 cm for males. Heights fell even further in Neolithic populations, dropping down to 164 cm for males and 150 cm for females, only reaching and surpassing 170 cm at the end of the 19th century.
Another source found that Paleolithic humans living between 30,000 and 9,000 BC ran almost 5’10″, which is close to the average modern American male’s height. After agriculture was fully adopted, male height dropped to 161 cm, or 5’5.4″. Females went from 166.5 cm to 154.3 cm under the same parameters.
We know these changes to height also reflected worsened health, because with shortness came dental pathologies like caries, plaque, and decay, signs of arrested growth indicating instances of severe malnutrition, and skull abnormalities that stem from iron deficiency. People got shorter, sicker, and less healthy. Height wasn’t a cause of poor health, of course, but it was an indicator.
And that’s where the statistic of height shines – as an indicator. On a large scale, height increases indicate improved nutritional or socioeconomic status, while decreases indicate poor nutrition, famine, war, or economic hardship. Thus, as a population increases in height, it’s safe to assume that its people are either eating better, making more money, or both. If a population shows decreasing height (or stagnation, which the US is showing), we surmise that something is amiss. There exists no better modern day example of height following health than with North and South Korea. Several studies show that South Koreans are taller than their counterparts to the north. Since the two populations are so closely related, genetic differences can’t explain the discrepancy; it’s got to be environment, especially childhood nutrition. North Koreans are famously malnourished, and the height discrepancy between North and South – about three or four inches on average – is similar to the height discrepancy observed between Paleolithic and Neolithic populations.
There are numerous other examples. Up until the late 1800s, Northern Plains Indian tribes were the tallest people in the world, standing over 172 cm (or about 5’8″) and subsisting on a nourishing diet of wild game, fish, berries, and native plants. That height advantage disappeared with reservation life, of course. Fry bread, vegetable oil, sugar, and white flour mixed with extreme stress and economic hardship are poor substitutes for fresh buffalo and open plains. What about Americans, the ones who supplanted the Plains tribes? For most of the past two hundred years, Americans have been the tallest people in the world, until about fifty years ago when height began to stagnate. Today, American males stand around 5’10.5″, but we haven’t grown in decades and other countries have long since passed us. Meanwhile, European and Asian countries have steadily gained on us. The Dutch, whose men stand over 6′ and whose women stand over 5’7″, are now the tallest in the world. American males are ninth tallest and American females are fifteenth, and any regular reader of mine knows that the nutritional situation in America needs a lot of work. It’s no surprise that we’re stagnating while other countries with better nutrition are growing.
And yet for all the concrete links between a population’s height, health, and nutrition (especially childhood nutrition), some researchers have linked “excessive” height to poor health and longevity. Barring the obvious examples of short-lived people with gigantism and other endocrine disorders, there is some evidence that the shorter among us live the longest. Thomas Samaras, a height/health researcher, has authored several papers arguing that bigger is not necessarily better. In one, he reviews human and animal evidence and seems to present a strong argument, but others have argued that Samaras overlooks evidence to the contrary. While Samaras chooses to focus on increased mortality from non smoking-related cancers in the tall, he ignores the bevy of evidence showing that in industrialized nations, taller people enjoy more protection from all-cause mortality, including heart disease, stroke, and respiratory disease.
But what about those centenarians? As Samaras notes, they, along with nonagenarians (between 90 and 99 years old), are on average shorter than the rest of the population. The long-lived Okinawans are famously dimunitive, and it seems like every other Mediterranean centenarian in the news is a spry old lady.
I like one possible explanation for centenarians being shorter and slighter while enjoying better health and longevity: insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, a protein produced in the liver and stimulated by growth hormone that induces systemic growth in almost every cell of the body, including muscle, bone, various organs, cartilage, skin, nerves, and lungs. It even affects DNA synthesis and individual cell growth. IGF-1 is perhaps the biggest determinant of height in humans: in infants, IGF-1 correlates strongly with growth, IGF-1 is highest during growth spurts in pre-teens and teens, and higher levels of IGF-1 usually correlate with adult height. Clearly, enough IGF-1 is required for proper musculoskeletal development, but what about too much? Can you have too much IGF-1?
Staffan Lindeberg thinks that excessive serum levels of IGF-1 from diet-induced hyperinsulinemia are causing unhealthy amounts of growth, which manifest as higher rates of cancer and, yes, height, in Western populations. Simply put, Lindeberg agrees that a population’s height is an indicator of health, but only to a point, after which it indicates excessive and potentially problematic levels of IGF-1. There’s probably something to this; female centenarians are more likely to have an IGF-1 receptor mutation that results in elevated serum levels of IGF-1 while reducing IGF-1 receptor activity. In other words, the body was producing more IGF-1 to make up for the lack of receptor activity. This same receptor mutation has been linked to longevity in multiple animal models resulting in higher serum IGF-1 and lower IGF-1 receptor activity – just like in the human centenarians. In male and female offspring of the centenarians, however, only females showed elevated serum levels. Male offspring had similar IGF-1 levels to control males (those with no familial history of longevity). Female offspring were also 2.5 cm shorter than control females; male offspring were of similar height to control males. Perhaps short stature is more beneficial to women?
Maybe so. Gavrilova looked at draft cards filled out by 30 year-old Americans who would eventually grow up to become centenarians and analyzed the differences between the physical stats of those who would eventually grow up to become centenarians and those who didn’t. While obesity (or “stoutness,” as it was called back then) had strong negative links to longevity, height did not. The group of future centenarians was mostly people of medium height. Being soldiers, however, these were exclusively males. According to the IGF-1 receptor mutation study, only in females is the mutation linked to lower heights and greater longevity.
Overall, though? Height is linked to a population’s health and good childhood nutrition. In certain individuals, given certain genetic differences, short stature may indicate the potential for greater longevity, but not on a population-wide scale. Besides – barring pharmaceutical (or cybernetic) interventions, there’s not a whole lot we full-grown adults can do to alter our heights.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Share your thoughts in the comment board.
Grab a copy of Primal Blueprint Quick & Easy Meals for over 100 Primal Recipes You Can Prepare in 30 Minutes or Less
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Just met up with a distant relative who grew up very differently from me, in lifestyle and nutrition. We are exactly the same height and build…(short), incidentally, the same shape as my grandmother.
My kids eat such healthy food, healthier than I did as a child. And yet they look just like old photos of my brothers and I at the same age!!
They’re on the short side. Lots of longevity in my family along with the short, curvy build, so no complaining here!!
If nothing else, the comments to the article prove that there are still a lot of bigotry and biases related to height. I feel for the short guys out there that feel like they have to work far harder to prove their worth, just because of their height. Regardless of diet, there is a genetic component that a person has no control over. Not that it couldn’t happen, but I don’t think you’re likely to see many very tall children of very short parents….even with a superb diet. And frankly, do we really all want to be the same?
What did the central european Grok do that the asian grok didn’t do, to grow long bones?
And why does the african Grok have THE longest bones.
Some documentary I’ve watched stated that africans jump in place from the day they can stand. They chant and bounce in place sometimes for hours.
If done for thousands of years, generation after generation, would that start to affect bone growth and height?
Sure seems like it, I think. So what did Grok in europe do that grok in asia didn’t?
6′ 4″ and good with it.
I’m tall, which does ultimately add a lot of stress to my body that a shorter person would not have to deal with. Hitting my head on things, lifting heavy things, pull ups (the exercise, not the diapers), cutting things on a kitchen counter (don’t even get me started with the extra short installations in restrooms) – all the bane of the tall person’s existence.
I watch my son grow (he’s only 18 months now) and am concerned that he will be even taller than I am. I worry because we very much live in a world that expects people to be within a certain range, and I am at the upper edge (or already over that range). I would hate to see him having to deal with the consequences of being ‘too tall’.
That said, I wouldn’t change my height – consequences be damned – for the world.
My husband and I are 6’4″ (him) and 5’10.5″ (me) and everything is too short. They build everything for midgets it seems…even the clothes and shoes.
We gave the toilet extra height (build a box under the toilet and raise it up above the box with piping)
I love it.
Move the bathroom mirror up…get rid of the door frame (above), build your own door (easy) that goes all the way to the ceiling like in old castles. Tables sit on blocks we bought at the store for $9.
We demolished the kitchen and now have shelves (with no doors) along all the kitched walls, with plates, pots and pans and glasses being placed in hands reach. Even my computer desk is 6 inches taller than a reg. table and the monitor sits on an additional box.
The house was remodeled to fit us giants.
Woodshop is an awesome hobby…lol.
I am 6’3″ 215lbs. Growing up my parents (and therefore I) were practically carnivores. We rarely ate out, my mom graciously cooked dinner every night. Now nutritionally dinner wasn’t all that great, meat often cam breaded and fried and the one side was either potatoes, or some other high carb “vegetable.” My parents still consider corn a vegetable. What is really intereting was I had my growth spurt at 10 years old. By the time I was 12 I was 6’1″ and 225lbs. I wonder what my IGF-1 levels looked like and what effect it will have on me in the future.
At 6’2″ I’ve always enjoyed being tall. I was definitely well nourished as a kid, too. I think it’s safe to say I was OVERnourished. Thankfully, I got over that.
Inbreeding is also indicated in short stature. Italian immigrants were typically much shorter than ‘native’ Americans. Their children were of US average height.
Some of this difference can be accounted for by prosperity/nutrition, but much had to do with exogamy. Most immigrants came from small villages with limited genetic diversity. After coming to the US, even if they remained in ethnic ghettos, they were likely to marry people who came from more distant locations. Hence taller kids.
This may be true of more recent immigrants from Latin America as well, but I don’t recall hearing of it.
Could the size and shape of the maxilla have something to do with height in people?
Weston Price says in his book that when mothers had malnutrition and gave birth to a child with down syndrome, the face (the maxilla bone) shows the most severe deformity. The pituitary gland doesn’t have enough room to develop and therefor won’t function correctly, thus resulting in a hormonal imbalance.
My mother is the last and shortest child in her family. She’s about 5’5 with short legs and short neck and was born with a cleft palate. This is extremely short for being of nordic descent.
The first born has a wide palate with excellent facial features and is 6’2″ tall. (born in finland while mother had finnish nutrition)
They moved to Germany and started eating rye and white sugar…also WWII was about to start.
The 2nd child grew up tall, but ended up with a narrow face and a narrow palate with crooked teeth.
My mother born at the end of WWII. Her Mom was severely malnurished. Gave birth to a child with cleft palate (now my Mom).
Both parents were tall, grandmother 5’11″ and grandfather 6’3″.
My mother ended up 5’5″, and I believe it was malnutrition that caused it…not my own mother eating junk food while growing up…as stated in the article.
The junk food back then consisted of white sugar and rye products and canned vegetables.
Saying that tall slender people grew up on junk food is ridiculous!!!
Don’t be a hater just cause you’re short =P
My grandparents grew up on their traditional foods.
I’m about 6’6″ – it will be interesting to see how tall my eventual kids grow.
Oh and @Mike – I don’t know what they were talking about. I went to Penn State and saw the football players around campus a bunch of times. I was a good bit taller than most of them, including offensive linemen. Now the basketball team – that was a different story. They made me feel pretty short!
im 6.4 beat that!
Mark, I’m a believer!
I tried to stay gluten free during my pregnancy (but hadn’t quite made the full transition until after pregnancy). My husband and I are paleo. My son does partake in gluten, but only for treats (at birthday parties, etc.) He prefers to eat a lot meat and fruit. At 36 months (3 years exactly), he is almost 41″ tall (above 95th percentile) and 33lbs (he is lean b/c he is active- 1/2 mile run with us daily, does burpees and rides his bike daily.)
Hilariously enough, up until recently (so for about 18 years) I was eating absolute garbage.
Fast food, one or two cans of coca-cola a day, not sleeping enough.
Yet I’m a male at 6’1”
Did you eat garbage before the age of 12?
Were you breastfed?
This is interesting
Was not breastfed. Something that my mom is not proud of (but I forgave her haha).
I lived on fast food and coke. Not the powedered junk, the soda
.
I get the feeling I’m just an outlier.
Or I had an UNHEALTHY amount of growth hormone in relation to my health.
I actually am the tallest in my family too.
6 foot and 1 inch at 17 years old and 200 lbs…And thanks to a Paleo/Primal diet..
The same at 54 years old…..the skeleton is broken up a bit…but the muscles still ripple
LOVE TO ALL MARK!!
GROK ON>>>
Estrogen is also supposed to halt growth in height.
That’s why females tend to slow down way more than males when puperty hits.
I wonder if guys that run higher than normal on estrogen during puperty end up short because of it.
Diet and Nutrition definitely have an effect on child’s future height. Both of my grand parents are super short, my mom is much taller then them, and my uncle is even taller then my mom.
I am not sure if shorter means longevity, but good nutrition equals health and health equals longevity.
BTW I know you said at the beginning of the article that women prefer taller guys, I have to disagree because I am a woman and I love short guys, tall guys kind of scare me.
My husband is Dutch and he is 6’4″ and was raised on a diet rich is dairy produce. His staples as a child were cheese, milk, eggs and butter. Grains also featured heavily on the menu with bread, cereals and legumes being top of the pile. I lived in Amsterdam for 4 years and was tired of sandwiches for lunch every day after a few weeks. I packed frittata and salad for lunch which was viewed as odd. Why didn’t I want to eat bread like everyone else?
I am only 5’6″ but was raised in Australia on a diet consisting of meat, poultry, vegetables and fruit with some grains thrown in for good measure. I ate cheese and drank milk but neither were consumed in vast quantities.
You are mixing up nutrition and genetics in a very confusing and incorrect way. People who receive adequate nutrition will reach their optimal genetically determined height. People with poor nutrition or hormonal imbalances can end up shorter (or sometimes taller) and generally have health problems to go with it. It is ridiculous to complain of “height stagnation” in the U.S. population which is extremely genetically diverse, and compare it to a small population like Holland which is less diverse. Obviously the difference is genetic. You can not make your child grow taller than his/her genetic potential by feeding the child what you believe is a superior diet. You can only prevent poor growth that would result from an inadequate diet.
Interesting article. My two aunt’s lived in China (100% Russian descent) until they were 8 and 10 and suffered malnutrition. They are both short – about 5″1 and are kind of weak both psychologically and physiologically. My mother on the other hand was born when they got to Australia in 1952, is about 5″6 or 5″7 and is far more robust in all ways. Pretty big difference, huh?
The reason Americans are shorter on average, is the large immigrant population skews the numbers. These folks eat “third world protein” sources, and in general eat poorly. No matter how good we eat, we can’t escape that fact.
Hey has everyone heard Mark Zuckerberg has gone primal by killing everything he eats?
Check it out at http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/opinion-zone/2011/05/mark-zuckerberg-kills-goat-pig-and-chicken-food
Should be interesting and debate stirring!
34″, but then again…diameter isn’t everything.
Does the decrease in height for the American population considers the waves of imigrants from ethnic groups that are naturally smaller? Maybe it hasn’t changed as much if we consider separate groups.
All me and my (female) siblings are 5’8 – 5’10. Of course, there must totally be a genetic component. But, we also ate “healthy” growing up: so, while there were grains, for sure, they were never refined and always whole, and we didn’t get the yummy cereal (just the branny stuff). When mom baked pies, the crust was made with whole wheat flour. Most importantly, probably, there was zero soda, chips, candy, fast food, or any of the packaged or processed food a lot of kids get. Our mom was totally opposed. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were always home-made. To be honest, I realize we had limited fruit too. (We did drink juice though.) — Suffice it to say, we loved eating at friend’s houses: it felt like a junk food spree — Lucky for us, we also had real butter and always full fat cheeses. The milk was 1%, the prevailing wisdom at the time.
Anyway, maybe the controlled wannabe-healthy carbs and lack of to many of them (maybe?) helped us attain our tallness.
Hmmm, I know that my sister (a type 1 diabetic) who has self induced hyperinsulinemia (eating too much crap and taking too much insulin to “cover” it) has grown as an adult, especially in her mid twenties. We used to be the same height, now she’s 2 inches taller and I have not shrunk! She also has bigger hands and facial features. I’m sure she has thrown her hormones out of whack and has somehow increased her IGF1. Just to agree, taller does not always mean healthier (not in this modern world anyway)
I grew up as a competitive gymnast and we are usually short from all of the pounding on our joints, so they say. I ended up just under 5’4″ and one of the taller woman in my family. My younger brother is over 6 foot, I believe. I wonder if my being a gymnast had much influence on me being so much shorter? Though I do know of former gymnasts who ended up being about 5’10″.
According to the CW, I have always eaten really healthy, had to for the 5 to 6 hours of training I did daily. My younger bro did eat much worse than I did. It does makes me wonder how the insulin influences your hight?
I’m 5’4″ and have a 7″ schlong. Do you think it may have something to do with my diet?
Why you ask? Which meassurement doesn’t satisfy you? :p
Who cares! Go make money selling your schlong as a dildo model
I’m 6’4″, now 43yo and half sicilian!
I think there’s a strong correlation (causation?) between dairy consumption during childhood and height. See the dutch! And what about the Massai? They’re freaking tall while on an overall low calorie diet.
I always loved milk, cream, cheese, butter, yoghurt. Got into trouble often for eating the butter pure (or drinking the raw cream my mother bought for cooking), right from the fridge and eating the family stock of yoghurt al alone at once.
My son (16yo) is “just” 6’0″ (btw, I was my height by 16) despite his mother comming from a tall family too.
He doesn’t like milk and cheese as much as I do…
About short vs. tall guys fighting my experience is that the short/stocky guys do start the fights to prove themselves. Beeing always the tallest but youngest in my class I had this happen all the time from primary school til my late teens. And I have still all my teeth…
Everyone is so caught up comparing inches here that no one is noticing the obvious. There is ONLY data for how tall these various early populations were, in addition to the estimated point at which humans became agrarian. That is not enough information to get excited about.
No data is presented that indicates why poor nutrition was achieved. I don’t think early farmers would have been particularly good at it. Do you? Some would have thrived, and others not. Possibly they HAD to farm but had several generations of poor harvest (while they learned how to do it) before they produced enough grain to once again provide enough nutrition to reach normal heights. The obvious nutritional deficiencies could have been caused by what, how much, and how good the food was.
Too strict a delineation without data will only undermine your attempt to get more people eating better.
I doubt the link between health and height because Japanese and many other Asians are healthy but they are not tall.
My chinese doctor in Germany was a freak at 6’1″ tall. He was from Hong Kong and immigrated to Germany ’cause he married a German.
One question is what is the average human’s genetic height? I think it’s around 6 feet tall or so for men. In other words if a man grows up under 6 feet tall then it shows a childhood of poor nutrition and/or a number of illnesses. Hence traditional Westerners were short during most of the agricultural peroid – never enough food (esp. protein) while regularly getting ill. Conversely, hunter-gatherer people with plentiful balanced food and exercise (and general absence of disease as evidenced by the death toll when Westerners arrived with their diseases) have had a tendency towards being tall and muscular. Hence I would agree with the idea of the article that height is one good measure of peoples’ health.