When Rishi Sunak became the UK’s shortest male prime minister since Winston Churchill – Sunak is reportedly 1.68m (5ft 6in) compared with the UK male average of 1.78m ( 5ft 10in) – jokes about his height ensued. But does height really matter? I asked Prof Majid Ezzati , whose large-scale study analysed how height has changed globally in the last 100 years.
I didn’t take the Rishi Sunak jokes too seriously. After all, if you can’t be schoolyard about arguably Britain’s most powerful billionaire, who can you? At the same time, I hear that surgery to add height has become increasingly popular with men.
Oh gosh!
It’s horrific – they have to break our legs to do it. It’s sad to see so much self-loathing about something you’re born with.
Well, height isn’t just what you’re born with. Yes, it’s very heritable, but height is also a product of environment, and driven by conditions from pre-pregnancy to late adolescence. That means what you eat, but also childhood diseases. Repeated infections mean we don’t grow as tall. Height is a mirror of the conditions of a society.
Makes sense – better food supply, medicine and vaccines will help you grow taller. But why does that even matter anyway?
Well, taller people have a lower risk of many, many diseases, though they may have a higher risk of cancer. And some studies have found that taller people do better in education and earn more. Though Rishi Sunak hasn’t done badly in terms of earning.
Does this apply to women, too?
Mostly. The main difference in terms of sex is just that boys tend to grow taller and have their growth spurt at a different time.
RIP my feet – sounds as if it’s time to dig out the high heels. Hey, I’ve always wondered how ethnicity factors? Take me: I’m not quite at the UK average for a woman ( 1.65m, or 5ft 5in) but I tower over my mum. Obviously we’re both of tiny but mighty south Asian heritage but I was born in the UK.
The jury is out on how ethnicity matters, because it may not just be about genes, but the effect of our parents’ and grandparents’ environment, alongside our own. In one study in Guatemala, which at the time had some of the shortest people in the world, they improved the nutrition of a group of young children. The children grew taller and the children’s children grew taller, too. Countries that have gained a lot of height over the past 100 years include South Korea and Japan, China, Iran and Turkey – as well as parts of Latin America. This shows that people in most parts of the world may be able to grow to the same height over enough generations.
Currently the Dutch are the tallest in the world, with the average man standing at 1.83m (6ft). But they are starting to shrink, losing 1 cm (0.4in) from their average recently. The British have stopped growing, too.
This has happened in many high-income countries. Some have wondered if this is down to migration, but it looks more likely to be nutrition. In the case of the Netherlands, the Dutch school milk programme is famous. Yet here in the UK, we have kids going to school hungry. We talk a lot about obesity – for very good reasons – but we forget that a big part of health is people growing taller. And in some sense, we should all want to be as tall as possible.
