Tall People and Shortened Minds
My wife and I both have Fitbit watches, those ingenious electronic devices that measure the number of steps taken during a run, walk or just tinkering about the house or yard. In converting steps to miles with the fit bit calculator, one must enter the height of the user. A taller person takes longer strides and thus, requires fewer steps to cover a mile. I’m not sure if it’s from a sentiment of greater deservedness, or if she forgot the watch earlier in the day, but our youngest daughter has a tendency to shake the device on her arm, while seated, to deceptively advance the number of steps. The other option, at only 5 feet tall, and much shorter than her siblings, she feels rightfully entitled.
At one time, my wife and I would hike and climb in the Tobacco Root, Bull, Highland, and other Mountains in Montana and would come across early mining operations that were active in the late 1800s and earlier 1900s. For the most part, the operations would consist of an adit, or horizontal entrance into the mine, along with a few buildings which housed a simple mill, a compressor house, and some storage. A short distance away would be housing and at times, a bunkhouse. What was surprising was the height of the adit and excavations as well as the doors into the various buildings. In an earlier time, people were much shorter.
The chart below, from “Our World in Data” shows the human growth in height commencing in 1896:
During these earlier times and as history shows, poor nutrition, illness in childhood, and lack of medications and treatments severely limited human growth. That is until today. According to the story, “Era of tall athletes? Climate change could make things tougher for shorter superstars”, we can see yet another extraneous study piggybacking on the fallacy of climate change and the funding that the subject induces.
According to the study’s lead author a professor at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, “This suggests that global patterns of temperature and climate may have shaped human body types and their performance.” Thus, he is suggesting that climate change is making people’s bodies evolve.
The average American male is 5 feet 9.1 inches tall and weighs 195.7 pounds, while the average American woman stands slightly less than 5’4” and weighs 170.5 pounds. Now personal convictions in ‘wokism’ may believe in additional genders, with a plurality of pronouns, but I’ll leave it at that.
The weights for the average American in the year 1960 were 166.2 and 140 pounds respectively. While there are assuredly a number of factors for the additional poundage, the most consequential contributing factors would likely be fast foods, and the over-abundance of carbohydrates in the government food guide. The guide attempts to significantly reduce meats and fats of every kind.
As most everyone knows, the typical body shape has changed and an “obesity epidemic” continues. In a related matter, as I wrote in “A Saturday Short - Fictional Charges” CBS iterated that climate change is the perpetrator of childhood obesity
All studies should be related to a person’s health relative to width rather than taller or shorter. Yet, how absolutely fallacious and how shameless these other irrelevant and unrelated studies have truly become.