http://www.westonaprice.org/caustic_comments/spring2004.html

GETTING SHORTER
John Komlos, professor at the University of Munich, has been charting
trends in height throughout the world for most of his career. He notes
that in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years, human
stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 AD to a
low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. For
Komlos, height provides a kind of biological shorthand for a society's
well-being—and an indication of the amount and quality of food
available to the people—and this shorthand indicates that America was
a good place to live in the eighteenth century. Both white colonists
and black slaves were a good three inches taller than the average
European of the time. During the Civil War period, the average
American height dropped somewhat, but by the end of the nineteenth
century, Americans had regained the distinction of being the tallest
peoples in the civilized world. Since 1955, however, the average
height of Europeans and Asians has increased while the height of
Americans has remained flat or even fallen. Today Northern Europeans
are three inches taller than the average American—Dutch men average
six feet one and Dutch women average five feet eight. Americans also
rank 28th among industrialized countries in longevity. The decline in
height runs across all classes and racial groups. Komlos and his
colleagues recognize that diet plays a major role in determining
height, noting that both the wealthy and the impoverished in America
today consume mostly processed food (The New Yorker, April 5, 2004).
Where they are wrong is the suggestion that eating more fruits and
vegetables will make a population taller. To attain the imposing
height and general good looks that characterized Americans during the
Second World War, we'll need to start eating animal fats again, and
drink the kind of milk that we had during the first half of the
twentieth century—raw, whole milk from pastured cows.

TC