On average, black American women are getting shorter.
That's the conclusion reached by economist John Komlos, who analyzed data released by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It's surprising, since Americans in general have gotten 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, says Komlos, a professor at the University of Munich.
The NHANES data says black women born in the United States around 1980 are on average a little shorter than 5-foot-4 today. Those born in the mid-1960s are on average a little more than half an inch taller.
White women born around 1980, meanwhile, are more than three-fourths of an inch taller than black women of the same age. Komlos' study found white men to be a little bit taller on average than black men, but not to a statistically significant extent.
Exactly what these figures mean is not certain. But Komlos sees a relationship between the decline in height and obesity, a national epidemic that has hit black women particularly hard.
According to a 2007 report by the National Center for Health Statistics, 23.8 percent of black girls ages 12 to 19 are overweight, compared with 14.6 percent of white girls. The report said 51.6 percent of black women ages 20 to 74 are considered obese, compared with 31.5 percent of white women of the same age.
Komlos' study follows one he published two years ago, showing that the growth rate of the U.S. population had slowed since the end of World War II, at the same time as Western Europeans' growth rates were accelerating.
The Washington Post
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