biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. (“iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen i.q. points,” one nutritionist told me.)



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if there is an answer to the riddle of american height, it probably lies in holland, where everyone has a theory about stature. when i spoke to hans van wieringen, the pediatrician, he credited his people’s growth to child care: the dutch have the world’s best prenatal and postpartum clinics, free for every citizen. others pointed to the landscape (flatlanders are naturally tall, they said, just as mountain people are naturally short), to the calvinist religion (protestants are taller than catholics because their families have fewer mouths to feed), or to the dutch love of milk (a study in bavaria found a direct correlation between height and the number of cows per capita). the dutch are taller than the italians, one man suggested, because they go to bed at a reasonable hour.

-the height gap-