THE HAGUE — The world's tallest country is shrinking.
The generation of Dutch people born in 2001 is shorter than
the one born in 1980, a study by the country's statistics office said on
Friday.
اضافة اعلان
Lofty Dutch 19-year-old men currently measure an
average of 182.9 cm tall, and women are on average 169.3cm tall.
Factors including immigration and diet are likely to be
responsible for the change in height, which reverses a century and a half of
rapid growth, the study said.
"In the course of the last century we have become
taller and taller, but since 1980 the growth has stopped," it said.
"The men born in 2001 were on average 1cm shorter than
the generation from 1980, women 1.4cm on average."
But all is not lost.
"The Netherlands is still the tallest nation in the
world," the Central Bureau for Statistics said in a statement.
The smallest men are in East Timor while the smallest women
are in Guatemala.
The full reasons for the Dutch comedown are not entirely
clear.
One reason was immigration, "especially of people with
a non-Western background", whom the study said tend to be smaller on
average.
But growth had also "stagnated" among Dutch people
whose parents and grandparents were born in the Netherlands, it said.
Men had not got any taller since 1980 while there was a
"downward trend" among women.
At the start of the 19th century they were small by European
standards and only started to shoot up in the 1840s.
The question of why the Dutch are so tall remains unclear.
Increased prosperity as well as "natural selection in
which taller men and women had more children than shorter couples" is
likely the real reason, the statistics bureau said.
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