Land of the Giants: Dutch Tower over Americans

June 19, 2007 — -- When you think tall, you probably think America. Tallest buildings. Tallest athletes. Tallest population.

But no longer. A new study, conducted by the University of Munich and Princeton University, discovered that when it comes to height, Americans are coming up short -- literally.

The study found that partially because of lifestyle, America has the shortest population in the industrialized world.

Today, to find the world's tallest people, you have to look beyond the windmills, wooden shoes, and wheels of cheese … to tiny Holland.

That's right. The Dutch. And they're not just taller than Americans, they're towering over Americans.

In Amsterdam, even at six-foot-three, I had to get used to looking up, especially to the president of the Dutch Tall People's Club, six-foot-11 Paul van Sprundel.

When I asked Paul whether there's a part of him who looks down and says "Well, Holland is doing a lot better than America," he said without blinking an eye, "Well, a lot better. I don't know, but, you know, a lot of people from their own perspective, in their own country, say, 'I am tall,' and then they meet us and say, 'Whoa, you're really tall.'"

It turns out Americans haven't been the tallest people in the world for nearly 50 years. And even worse, every year, we're falling shorter of the top.

Today, the average Dutch man is six-foot-one, followed by the Danish, at six-feet. Americans measure up to just five-foot-10. Further behind, but catching up rapidly, are the Japanese, at about five-foot-seven.

You can see the growth of the Dutch etched into the architecture in Amsterdam. In buildings built in the 1600s, I can barely get through the door bending over.

But as the generations passed and the Dutch people grew, so did their doorways. Today, the new minimum required height for doorways to homes and businesses is seven feet, eight inches, which made me feel really short wherever I went.

A nation's average height is about more than bragging rights. Historians have found height to be about the best single indicator of a nation's success, reflecting not just wealth but overall health and well-being.

Professor George Maat of Holland's Leiden University has been tracing this back hundreds of years by looking at our ancestors' skeletons.