The women in Netherlands are getting taller too...
It’s the hashish.
I recall seeing a video taken in WWII of South African Boer young men who had been arrested for refusing to fight against Germany of something like that.
They showed maybe a dozen of them and every one was maybe 6’4” and looked to be around 230lbs. They were also a very handsome bunch.
'The immediate point was clear: America was a good place to live in the eighteenth century. Game was abundant, land free for the clearing, settlement sparse enough to prevent epidemics. On Komlos’s graph, even the runaway slaves are five feet eight, and white colonists are five feet nine—a full three inches taller than the average European of the time. “So this is the eighteenth century,” Komlos said, slapping the files. “This is not problematic. It shows that Americans are well nourished. Terrific.” He reached into a cardboard folder and pulled out another series of graphs. “What is problematic is what comes next.”
Around the time of the Civil War, Americans’ heights predictably decreased: Union soldiers dropped from sixty-eight to sixty-seven inches in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, and similar patterns held for West Point cadets, Amherst students, and free blacks in Maryland and Virginia. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.
Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.
The average American man is only five feet nine and a half—less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.'
I have noticed there seems to be a whole lot of beautiful girls from Vancouver, BC. They all have Dutch last names.
It's all part of the Dutch Menace.
I’m sure it has something to do with climate change.
Same story in the areas around me where folks of predominantly Dutch heritage live. Namely NW Iowa/Sioux County. The people in general are noticeably taller there. The VanderBoersmas are tall!
I know the answer: Tulip extract.
5.56mm
I’ve been to The Nethlands many times and almost all the ethnic Dutch are taller than I am. I’m six feet tall and it is the first thing I notice. Even adolescent girls are approaching six feet tall. Crazy.
Then I go to Paris and the first thing I notice is that I’m taller than everyone on the subway car by almost a head height, and usually two. Sometimes three, even. Except for the French-African guy probably from Senegal a few rows over who is almost as tall as I am when he’s sitting down. A pretty tall Frenchman is five foot six, but up in Normandy the people seem lots taller. France and Japan seem to share the same average height.
England is full of tall people too.
I believe that it is the Fresians that are taller. There is a Dutch community in our county and they say it is the Fresians influence. When my son was in high school, he went to school there. There were for kids on the basketball team as tall or taller than my son, who was 6’4” in high school. He grew two more inches in college and I assume that the other boys did also. We aren’t Dutch, though.
Davy Jones, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy
Probably all nice guys, but not overly tall.
Girls in the 70s wanted those kind of guys.
Excess viagra? ;-P
I’m mostly Norwegian, and I’m 6’6. All of my close friends are from Norse/Dutch/German stock. My Texan-Irish wife is 5’10, My little tow headed boy has been taller at every age marker so far. Northern Europeans are generally tall.
So they can see what the Walloons are up to.
Dairy products, and not the fat free kind. The Dutch consume a lot of dairy products.
TO keep from drowning as the waters rise.