Survey gives full breakdown of America’s tallest, shortest states

The tallest adult men in America live in Iowa and Alabama, while the tallest women live in South Dakota.

Hawaii, meanwhile, can lay claim to the shortest members of either sex.

Those figures come from the latest release of data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a massive annual survey of health and well- ness in the United States. In 2017 the CDC polled over 450,000 people for the survey, enough to provide accu- rate estimates of health-related data in all 50 states. The typical public opinion poll, by contrast, surveys about 1,000 people nationwide.

The BRFSS is used to track state-level trends in weight and obesity, healthy eating, and physical activity. But the BRFSS also asks its respon- dents, all of whom are age 18 and older, about their height.

At the state level it runs from about 5’9” in Hawaii to about 5’11” in Alabama and Iowa. Generally speaking, men in the Northern Plains states and a swath of Appalachia report the tallest heights, while men in the Northeast and Southwest tend to be shorter.

What’s driving those differences? Race is one big factor. Medical examination data maintained by the CDC shows that white (average height of 5’10”; rounded to the nearest inch) and black (5’9”) men tend to be sig- nificantly taller than Asian (5’7”) or Hispanic (5’7”) men. Hawaii, California and New York have high Hispanic and Asian popula- tions. In Hawaii, fewer than one-third of the population identifies as black or white. In Alabama, by contrast, 96 percent of the population is black or white.

A simple way to control for the effects of race is to examine the data for one racial subset of men. We’ll use white men in this case, for the sole reason that that gives us the biggest sample size nationwide, and hence the most reliable data.

Even when you isolate white men, the results follow the same general con- tours: the tallest men live in the plains and Alabama, while the shortest are in the northeast and southwest.

This suggests there are some other factors at play in determining height. Researchers believe child- hood nutrition is a big one.

The nationwide picture for women looks different.

First, women are shorter overall, with a nationwide average of about 163 centime- ters, or 5’4”. Geographically speaking, the tall women are clustered more tightly in the northern plains than the men are. The tallest women, with an average height of about 5’5”, are in South Dakota. The shortest, again, are in Hawaii, with an average height a hair less than 5’3”.

In the interest of completeness we’ll do the same exercise for white women that we did for white men. No real surprises there. Here’s the thing: people lie about their height. Men lie about it more than women. Every year the CDC administers a separate, smaller survey, called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which includes a medical exam administered by a professional.

For our national samples in a given year, we can compare the BRFSS’s self-reported heights with the actual measurements taken by medical professionals for the NHANES.

In 2016, the most recent year for which this direct comparison is possible, men self-reported their heights an average of 2.3 centimeters, or nearly a full inch, above what their actual measurements showed. Women over-reported their height too, by about 1.5 centimeters. Unfortunately, the NHANES doesn’t release state-level data so we have no way of knowing which states lie the most about their heights.