WHEN IT COMES to height, new research shows that Dutch men and Latvian women are head and shoulders above the rest.

Dutch men are the tallest in the world and today stand at an impressive 183cm (6ft) in height on average. Meanwhile, Latvian women are 170cm (5ft 7in) in height.

The research was published in the eLife journal and measured the height of across 200 countries of people born between 1886 and 1996.

The measurements are taken for 18-year olds, so the first measurements come from 1914, and the last from 2014.

Irish men come in at 179cm (5ft 10in) putting them 20th on the list. Meanwhile, Irish women are an average height of 165cm (5ft 5in) placing them 24th.

At very opposite end of the scale to the Dutch, the research shows that men from East-Timor are the smallest, at 160cm (5ft 3in) on average. Meanwhile, Guatemalan women are the smallest at 149cm (4ft 11in).

Growth trends 

South Korean women and Iranian men have had the biggest growth spurts since 1914, increasing their heights by an average of 16cm (6in) and 20cm (8in) respectively.

In general people in East Asia have grown the most since 1914, with people in China, Japan and South Korea having made some of the biggest increases.

Irish men are now 12cm (4.7in) taller than they were in 1914, while Irish women are 11cm (4.3in) taller.

In some places in Africa people have gotten smaller since the 1970s, while in countries of South Asia (India and Pakistan, for example) people haven’t changed too significantly in height.

“About a third of the explanation could be genes, but that doesn’t explain the change over time,” lead scientist Majid Ezzati from Imperial College London told the BBC.

While genes could go some way to explaining how changes in height have varied over the years across different countries, they weren’t the sole reason.

“Genes don’t change that fast and they don’t vary that much across the world,” he said.

So changes over time and variations across the world are largely environmental. That’s at the whole population level versus for any individual whose genes clearly matter a lot.

An interactive chart of the tallest to shortest countries can be found here

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