The Recent Decline in the Physical Stature of the U.S. Population Parallels the Diminution in the Rate of Increase in Life Expectancy

The U.S. healthcare and food-provisioning systems have failed to create an environment in which the human biological organism can flourish. Consequently, key health outcomes, most notably life expectancy, have consistently lagged those of other high-income populations since the Reagan era, coinciding with the adoption of economic policies that increased inequality and precarity across the population. We estimate the trends in physical stature, another omnibus indicator of a population’s biological well-being that reflects not only nutritional intake, inequality, and stress experienced by the population, but also the overall health environment—using a sample of 44,322 adults from the NHANES surveys, stratified by gender and three ethnic groups. We find that the height of Americans began to decline among those born around or before the early 1980s in parallel with the diminution in the rate of increase of life expectancy. The decline in adult height ranged from 0·68 ± 0.36 cm among white women to 1·97 ± 0.50 cm among Hispanic men and is statistically significant across all six demographic groups considered. This decline in heights serves as corroborating evidence that the U.S.’s laissez-faire approach to healthcare and food provisioning delivers suboptimal population health outcomes. Public health priorities urgently need to be refocused.