Height gains taper off for Dutch, world's tallest people

2008-01-07 12:48:46 -

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - Height increases for the Dutch, thought to be the world's tallest people, have tapered off since the turn of the century, the country's statistics agency said Monday.
«The adult man in the Netherlands has scarcely grown since 2001,» the Central Bureau for Statistics said in a statement. «There is a slowdown in the growth of women, too.
The height of the average Dutch man increased by more than 3 centimeters (an inch) from the start of the 1980s, to above 180 centimeters (just below 5 foot, 11 inches) in 2000.
But since then, the increase has been marginal and adult men in 2006 were 181 centimeters (slightly above 5'11»), the statistics agency said. Adult women were 168 centimeters (around 5'6»).
The agency used numbers gathered from its annual health poll of around 10,000 people. Both men and women tend to exaggerate their height, and the agency adjusted numbers downward to reflect overstatements observed in earlier studies by health authorities.
Several international surveys have proclaimed the Dutch as the world's tallest, most recently a paper published in the Annals of Human Biology co-authored by professors from Princeton and the University of Munich.
The government statistics agency did not speculate on why growth was slowing, but hinted the Dutch may have reached their maximum potential.
«It's very likely true that there's a certain maximum (height) determined by biological factors,» it said, noting that the largest jump in height had come in the cohort now aged 40-49 years old.
«Because it is the youth that would, in principle, have to account for further growth, the hypothesis appears justified that the height increase of adult Dutch in the coming years will be less than in the two decades before 2000,» it said.
It noted that while an influx of immigrants has lowered the national average height slightly, the slowdown in growth was observed among the native population.