Kuwait 87th for men, 90th for women
Dutch, Latvians tallest in world
KUWAIT CITY, July 26, (Agencies): Kuwait landed on the 87th spot for men and 90th for women in the list of 200 countries ranked according to adult human height.
Results of the work of researchers, who analyzed adult human height data from 200 countries in the past century, were published Monday on the journal eLife.
On the position of other GCC countries, Qatar ranked 104th for men and 91st for women, the United Arab Emirates ranked 105th for men and 108th for women, Oman ranked 122nd for men and 141st for women, Bahrain ranked 140th for men and 147th for women, and Saudi Arabia ranked 144th for men and 159th for women.
If you want to see a tall population of men, go to the Netherlands. Tall women? Latvia.
And in the United States, which lags behind dozens of other countries in height, the average for adults stopped increasing about 20 years ago.
That’s the word from researchers who analyzed a century’s worth of height data from 200 countries.
National height averages are useful as an indicator of nutrition, health care, environment and general health that people have experienced from the womb through adolescence, said Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, who led the research. Genes also influence height.
The researchers calculated average height for 18 year olds, roughly the age when people stop growing. They drew on more than 1,400 studies that covered more than 18.6 million adults who reached that age between 1914 and 2014.
The tallest men in the new analysis were Dutch, with an average height of about 6 feet (182.5 centimeters). The next nine tallest countries in order for men were Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, BosniaHerzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Iceland and the Czech Republic.
Latvia topped the list for women, with an average height of 5-foot-6 (170 centimeters). Rounding out the top 10 were the Netherlands, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovakia, Denmark, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
Over the century-long span of the study, the biggest gains appeared in South Korean women and Iranian men, who added 8 inches (20.2 centimeters) and 6 ó inches (16.5 centimeters), respectively. There was little change in South Asia and some sub-Saharan African countries.
The shortest female population in the study is in Guatemala, at an average of 4-foot-11 (149.4 centimeters). It is followed in order by the Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal, East Timor, Madagascar, Laos, the Marshall Islands, India and Indonesia. The shortest male population is in East Timor, at an average of 5-foot-3 (160 centimeters). It is followed by Yemen, Laos, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Rwanda, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines and Mauritania.