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[quote=Anonymous]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/15/why-are-americans-getting-shorter/

https://theweek.com/health/height-in-america-shorter-public-health#

Though bias from self-reporting has long been considered a factor in this height assessment, experts have confirmed that the population is indeed becoming shorter. That change is due to health factors and nutrition, with the decline overwhelmingly linked to growing wealth inequality in the United States beginning in particular around the 1980s.

Ezzati explained there are still a lot of calories being consumed in the U.S., but the country "has become more obese than any other wealthy country" because the calories consumed "are not really high-quality calories." One of the outcomes of obesity is early puberty for children, leading to increased levels of estrogen in both boys and girls. Higher estrogen levels cause bones to "grow taller, faster, but then … growth plates fuse earlier," Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center, told the Post.

[b]- Following this method, the turning point becomes immediately and painfully clear: Around 1980, even native-born White men and women started getting shorter. (We’re looking specifically at Whites because they have the most robust data.)[/b]

- What changed in 1980? Childhood obesity began its steady rise, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And Komlos believes America’s weight problem may be causing its height problem.

- And if kids’ bones stop growing sooner, it’s possible they end up shorter. Greenspan said this is particularly true of young girls, which could help explain why we see heights dropping faster among millennial women.

- By driving down inequality, the New Deal and the Great Society literally lifted up the most vulnerable (and often shortest) Americans. When all-star economists Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond (University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University and Columbia University, respectively) ran the numbers on the rollout of food stamps in the United States from 1961 to 1975, they found that newfound access to food assistance in utero or early childhood caused a significant drop in stunting, or the odds of someone falling into the bottom 5 percent of heights as an adult.

- For the rest of their lives, shorter millennials will bear the physical stamp of the inequality that erupted in their infancy. When we’re trying to explain America’s unluckiest generation, we should consider not just what they’ve become, but how they started out.
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