Originally published at: The Dutch are shrinking | Boing Boing
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My first instinct is to blame the increased CO2 in the atmosphere which is making crops less nutritious. It probably also helped with crop yields for much of the 20th century which helped their height, so it is a double-edged sword.
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Makes sense. The pull of gravity is much stronger these days. /s
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Dr. Emmett Brown, “Is there a problem with Earth’s gravitational pull in the future? Why is everything so heavy?”
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Not enough bacon in their diets.
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I’m a 5’ 10 1/2" migrant. It’s my fault.
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I used to joke that the reason we’re taller is that the Earth is an oblate spheroid - we’re further north, so closer to the center of the Earth, so gravity is a tiny bit less.
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Shrinking, huh? We’ll, it serves them right for being so darn tall in the first place. Are they also getting rounder? It’ll be a job of work if they want to catch the US in that department.
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I’m a Dutchman and I’ve shrunk about a centimeter over the past forty-odd years, but that’s not important right now.
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I originally read the title as the dutch are sinking… thought this was some issue with their land sinking…
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Yeah, maybe the issue is that they are measuring from sea-level.
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maybe, like houseplants and goldfish, the dutch naturally grow to the size of their allowable space.
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It amazes me what a small geographical area this phenomenon follows (or seems to – my evidence is admittedly anecdotal). My wife and I moved from the US to the Flemish part of Belgium, not far from the Dutch border. In the US I was pretty average height for a man and my wife was above average for a woman. In Belgium, I felt short and she felt average.
Then we moved to France. Not a big move, mind you, we’re not all that far from the Belgian border. I once again feel average height, and not only does my wife feel tall, she literally cannot find shoes in her size – she has to order them from Benelux, the UK, or Germany and hope they fit. Her main local options are shops that cater to drag queens, and while she would love to support them, she is not of the opinion that she needs to look fabulous while she walks the dog.
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By that logic, Mongolians should be enormous, Dutch people should be pretty small, and you probably need to scrape Macanese off the bottom of your shoe (you murderer!). /s
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Is this just “regression to the mean” in action?
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Samesies! I have been able to keep my overall volume at the same level, though.
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Actually, that’s a good point. Is there an overall aging population contributing to part of this shift? Do we also see height declines (or plateaus, or slowing increases) in other developed countries over that same span?
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