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Black US women are getting shorter
Obesity epidemic may be a key cause of shrinking heights.
- By Lindsay Minnema, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 23:38 January 7, 2009
Washington: On average, black American women are getting shorter.
That's the conclusion reached by John Komlos, an economist who researches the relationship between standards of living and human health and body size. His study - not yet published - analyses data recently released by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), part of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
It's a surprising development since Americans in general have got taller from one generation to the next. For any population group in the developed world to get shorter "is more or less unprecedented in modern times, except in dire circumstances" such as war or famine, said Komlos, a professor at the University of Munich.
According to the data, black women born in the US around 1980 are, on average under 5'4" today. Those born in the mid-1960s are on average more than half an inch taller.
Komlos sees a relationship between the decline in height and obesity, a national epidemic that has hit African American women particularly hard.
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