Dutch people are tall. On average, anyway, since there are also plenty short folks around here. On the whole, we’re now actually the tallest people in the world, according to researchers from Princeton and Munich in the latest issue of Annals Of Human Biology. We have overtaken the previous record-holders, the Americans, whose junkfood culture is believed to play a role in their decreased growth rate. (That is vertical growth, obviously. Americans might well be the world’s horizontally largest people.) The fact that health care is more easily available to poor people here than it is on the other side of the Big Pond also seems to boost our average height.
