Reply #25: link to New Yorker article and interview with author on this topic [View All]

[ithacan]

here's the article:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/

THE HEIGHT GAP
by BURKHARD BILGER
Why Europeans are getting taller and taller—and Americans aren’t.
Issue of 2004-04-05
Posted 2004-03-29


and here's an interview with the author:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?040405on_onlineonly01

The Short American
Posted 2004-03-29

In “The Height Gap,” in this week’s issue and here online (see Fact), Burkhard Bilger writes about new questions raised by the study of human height. Here, with The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson, Bilger discusses what height says about a society’s health—and why Americans may be falling behind.

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Diet and health care are the most likely reasons. It appears as though we have a lot of short Americans, in part, because many can’t afford to get treated when they’re sick, or because they eat too much junk food. Also, some scholars seem to think that the effects of many Americans’ poor health and their poor diets might be creeping up the social ladder: we all live together and share the same diseases; rich kids go out and eat the same fast food that poor kids seem to be eating, and so they have the same obesity problems and the same lack of height. That may explain why even rich Americans aren’t getting any taller; unequal social situations may bring the entire society down.

Doesn’t America have the best health-care system in the world?

For those who can afford it, maybe, but not for a good chunk of the population that doesn’t have health insurance. One scholar’s studies imply that America doesn’t have the best health-care system, in terms of prenatal care and postnatal care. That might be better in Northern Europe than it is in the United States, and it’s hugely important for height.

Do Americans, as a society, have a height gap?

We do, and it’s really worth looking at. In recent years, we’ve had a tendency to suggest, as a society, that the growing income gap between the rich and the poor doesn’t really affect everyone—that it’s a necessary evil, an outgrowth of our over-all prosperity. What height tells us is that maybe it’s not as easy as that, that inequality of income may be pulling us all down.

Literally pulling us down.

Right, I think so.
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