Height, Health and Human Happiness

Tall people. Short People. Somewhere-in-between people. What are we to make of human height and its relationship to overall health and personality? Robert and Christian explore in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. All heights welcome.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Robert.
The audience probably doesn't know this, but you're a tall person.

(00:24):
I'm reasonably tall. I'm six two or six three. Yeah,
you're taller than me and Joe for sure. Though, as
we found out when we did our photo shoots a
couple of months ago, we always and whenever we do
the Facebook lives, we usually end up putting you in
the middle. So it's not like this weird lopsided three
headed creature. But yeah, you're definitely taller than the two
of us. I'm five. Depending on I guess, like how

(00:47):
how good my day is going. You know, it's interesting
to think about exact heights because some of the literature
were looking after this episode. I saw estimations onto what
degree nan round up their height? Oh yeah, and I
I find that I tend to round down. Really, I
can make a claim for six three, but I'd rather
just be six two, like I'm calling it at six two.

(01:09):
It's I bumped my head enough at six to uh
if I even think I'm a little bit taller. I
feel like I'm just gonna have more head injuries. That's
funny because I do the opposite. I totally round up
because I'm like, you know, when when I get the
measurement at like the doctor's office or whatever, it's like
five nine and three quarters or something like that, Like,
you know, I'm not totally five ten, but I just

(01:30):
say five ten to everybody. That's interesting, huh that somebody
should do a study on that. Uh, that would be
interesting in relation to what we're gonna talk about today.
So this is one of those like scientific I don't know,
past times that we end up seeing in like our
popular media a lot, like especially newspapers, that it's basically
like every couple of months, there's a publication that comes

(01:52):
out and it says, well, if you're over this height,
like if you're tall, then you're gonna live longer. If
you're short, you're gonna a die sooner, right, right, And
then like people read that and they're like, oh my god,
they go out of their minds. They start they go
out and they run for like two weeks, and then
they're like it's fine whatever. Well, and then likewise when
it comes to psychology. Uh, you'll find studies that that

(02:16):
are basically saying, oh, well, well short, shorter people that
behave like this, taller people behave like this. And then
we start turning the microscope on ourselves and like, oh, man,
am I like that? Do I have a Napoleon complex?
Or am I do I have some sort of like
tall person vanity? And uh, it gets problematic because you
end up with these broad generalities, oftentimes supported, especially in

(02:37):
the psychology realm, by studies that are maybe not that
large and convinced. Yeah, And so this is how we
got on the track for this episode. Was one of
these studies across our desk and we're like, oh, that's
kind of interesting, and it was, well, we'll mention it later,
but it was about height and lung disease, and we
were like, let's actually like take a look at like
the gamut here and see like all these studies together,

(02:59):
what we actually come down to, like, what is is
there anything to this? And if there is, is it
better to be taller? Is it better to be short?
In terms of health and both physical and mental? I
want to touch on just a couple of quick overviews
about human height. So over the last hundred and fifty years,
the average height of people in industrialized nations has increased

(03:20):
approximately ten centimeters or about four inches, and today the
average human height is currently about five ft seven and
a half inches for males or one seven two centimeters
and five ft two or one d fifty eight centimeters
for females. Uh. And the this has said a hundred
and fifty years out of all human history, that's a
very recent development. We actually have another episode of stuff

(03:42):
to blow your mind wanted to with Joe a while
back called Colossal the Science of Human Height that gets
a little more into why humans have grown or have
grown taller in the last hundred and fifty years, as
well as a look at certain gigantism scenarios. Yeah, so
that hundred and fifty years or so ends up pretty
well with our understanding of why height is related to health,

(04:04):
and in the basic assumption goes something like this that, uh,
it's a combination of your genetic potential and what's referred
to as net nutrition. So this is the food you taken,
especially during childhood, and how it determines how tall you
can grow. But then it's referred to as net nutrition
because there's things that can take away from the the net,

(04:27):
such as disease. So if you're if you have disease
in in your childhood, that can subtract from your net nutrition,
maybe leading to being a little shorter. So what we're
seeing is like as our nutrition has gotten better, as
the world has become more developed, as wealth is spread around.
That's why, especially in the America's and Europe, there are

(04:48):
taller people now. Now. For a long time, historians have
used recorded height actually as an indicator of the living
standard in both our health and our income. And this
is basically because there's not a whole lot of other
data available when they're looking at old records. Right, It's
not like we would have like socio economic records of

(05:10):
somebody's name written down, but a lot of times they
do record their height and their weight. Uh. And so
this general assumption about people earning more money and then
that being connected to health, that's one of the big
questions here for us today. I think, I mean maybe,
so there was this instance in China, there's a study
found that height does increase as health and survival do

(05:31):
in the twentieth century, so we're seeing that reflected in
China now the same way we saw it in America
and in Europe. This seems to support the idea that
adult height is like quote, a crystal ball that reflects
early life conditions such as nutrition and disease. So you know,
maybe there's something to that, But basically, the way we're

(05:51):
gonna look at it today is like, what are the
meta studies on this, right, Like, has anybody bothered to
take a wide lens look at all of these and
kind of figure out, like, so, what's the truth here
or not? And then we're gonna zoom in on the
ones that are detailed that are specifically about like organs
such as like your heart or your lungs or your brain,

(06:11):
and like whether or not those are affected by your height. Yeah,
because we you know, you get into the specifics of
all of this and you look at like, okay, who
tends to live the longest and it's a based on
the information I was looking at, yes, you, I believe
it's Japanese women, and like the longest in the Japanese women,
I'll do not have a reputation as being just towering
physical giants. So a lot of this, you know, you

(06:33):
deal with the generalities when you break it down, everybody
can name a short person who live for a long
time or a short short person who died early. The
same with with tall people, and nobody's coming up to
a tall person a short person on the street and saying, oh,
why did they not feed you when you were a child,
and you you will live forever. When you get into,
of course, the extremes, When you get into conditions that

(06:55):
cause an individual to be um you know, extremely a
small in stature, or you know they're suffering from some
sort of a gigantism scenario, then everything is going to
potentially be more out of line. But when we're doing
with sort of the standard realm of human heights, that's
where it gets really interesting and and difficult to to
pull apart. So let's look at this first theory, which

(07:16):
is just the general idea that short people live longer
than the tall people. Now we'll go to that example
that Robert just mentioned. According to the World Health Organization,
Japanese women have the longest average lifespan in the world.
They live to be, on average, eighty six years old.
The average height of a Japanese woman between the ages

(07:37):
of seventy and eighty is a hundred and forty nine
point five four centimeters or about four point nine feet tall,
So you and I would be towering over these people,
would be easily a foot or more over them. Um,
but they live longer. So for comparison, the average US
man like Robert and myself, lives to be about seventy

(07:59):
five And in two thousand and twelve, a study found
that shorter men in the US do actually live longer
than taller men. So that's one in my column. Although
I don't know, I don't know if I qualify as shorter.
I'm shorter than you, but I don't know if I'm shorter.
And we're gonna find this when we look at these
studies that the measurements are all over the place in

(08:20):
terms of like what height they used to measure as
tall and above, and what height they use as short
and lower. But here's the thing. There really isn't a
proven direct relationship between height and life expectancy. But there's
this idea out there that's connected to the short people
live longer theory called the Methuselah gene uh. And this

(08:42):
is named after Noah's grandfather in the Bible, he was
the oldest man that was listed in the Bible, and
he lived to age nine hundred and sixty nine. So
apparently none of us get to a thousand, even in
the Bible. Now, this Methuselah gene seems to be connected
to the idea that short people live longer, and basically
it's a rare genetic mutation that decreases the body's cellular

(09:04):
use of a particular kind of growth hormone, and those
who have it tend to be smaller and live longer.
But there are all kinds of factors that could be
involved here, right, that aren't just this gene. There could
be lifestyle factors, birth weight, early childhood, care, nutrition, vaccinations, antibiotics, diet,
and income level. All of these things are important. So

(09:24):
it's weird that we keep looking to height, and it
seems to be that we're doing that because of that
historical precedent, right, just like the basic idea that well,
height is connected to wealth, and subsequently wealth is connected
to a good nutritious environment, therefore those people will live
long access to healthcare as well, Yeah, exactly. Now, the

(09:45):
evolutionary biologist Dr Armand Leroy discovered the hormone that controls
our height, which is called insulin like growth factor or
we're going to just refer to it as i g
F here, and that it controls our height, but it
also controls our aging and so if you have a
low level of i g F, this means you're going
to have a longer life expectancy, right. Well, in animals

(10:07):
this seems to be true. For instance, smaller dogs live
longer than bigger dogs. This is this is an example
I thought of as being something that even if we're
not like directly analyzing it, it's in the background, Like
a lot of us tend to know that you have
this giant dog, it might not live as long as
this smaller scrappy mutt. Yeah exactly. Like I have friends
who have like the like tea CuPy Yorkies, like tiny

(10:29):
little dogs, and they live a long time, and then
like I guess, I mean, I don't remember what the
averages are, but like a big dog, I think isn't
expected to live longer than like a decade, right, Yeah.
I mean I've known people who have had the like
Great Danes, yeah yeah, and I think I think they
have all all the Great Danes have passed. Yeah, yeah,
that's too bad. But here's the other thing. There's another

(10:51):
animal that we can look to for this mice. And
I never even thought about this, but apparently dwarf mice
lives seventy five percent longer than other mice. So if
we pull that out and we look at humans, right,
this idea of the I g F connected to our
height and our agings seems to come out to be
about for every extra inch of height, it shortens your

(11:15):
life expectancy by an average of one point two years.
So if you're six two and I'm five ten, then
we got what three four inches between us, depending on
how we're rounding or what kind of hats were wearing.
So according to this, I'm gonna live four point eight
years longer than you, maybe if I don't get hit

(11:36):
by a bus on my way out of here. Um So,
I mean that's kind of part of it, right, It's
like you can't really I mean, that's obviously getting hit
by a bus can't be factored into your your health expectancies.
But it's kind of it's not factoring and all those
other things like your lifestyle or your diet or whatever
or nutrition. So I'm not entirely convinced that height is

(11:59):
a reliable predictor of health. And actually there was a
meta study that was published on this. There's a paper
by Angus Deaton that was published in two thousand six
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here
in the United States of America, and it indicates that
in developing countries there's an inconsistent relationship between height, health

(12:19):
and income. And he looked at developing countries specifically because
of the assumption that it's always been a money connected
to nutrition and health care factor. Now, his argument, after
looking at all these studies together is that basically heights
an unreliable predictor. For example, he asks why when he
looked at all of the measurements, were African people so

(12:40):
tall when they traditionally have a lower income and are
exposed to more disease. Right, So that seems the reverse
of what we we assume to be true about heightened health.
In the abstract for his paper, Deeton actually says taller
people earn more on average, and they do better on
cognitive tests and live longer. So that again, so we

(13:01):
were getting different reports here, right that his his research
the literary review that he went through for his paper
was basically that tall people live longer, even though we've
got all these other studies that say there's a methuselah
gene and short people live longer. So Deaton says that
as a consequence of possible disease and a lack of
nutrition earlier in life. The idea is that short people

(13:23):
are more prone to chronic disease late in life, and
therefore they're more likely to die earlier. But even the
increase in heights in Europe and North America are regarded
as not being driven by genetics, and this is specifically
here in Deeton's paper, but he says it's more about
changes in disease and nutritional environments. So all right, let's

(13:46):
back up here. Now we've got we've basically got two
competing meta theories. Right, We've got the one that says, well,
heights totally an unreliable predictor. H here's some data that
says people who are tall live longer. And then we've
got other studies that say, well, no, shorter people live
longer and there might be this methuslagen. Uh So what
we did was we basically pulled a bunch of studies

(14:08):
for this episode based on health and mental factors, and
we're gonna kind of go through them and cally up
as we go along and see which one of us
is going to live longer, Robert or me? Okay, the
great contest here. Okay, So let's take a quick break,
and when we come back, we're gonna start off with cancer. Alright,

(14:34):
we're back. We're talking about human height, short people, tall people,
shorter people or taller people. I guess you would say,
and uh, just the general question, does one of the
other have a leg up on living longer? Yeah? So,
unfortunately we don't have any studies into leg health related
to to height. Um, that seems like it would be
one of the first ones they'd go to, but I

(14:54):
didn't see any cross my radar. Uh. We do, however,
have a lot on cancer now out There has been
a link scene between breast cancer and women and height
that's been proposed as early as nineteen. So we're talking
about melanoma, thyroid, kidney, breast, colon, and rectum cancers all

(15:14):
being strongly associated with height, and studies have found that
women who are five ten or more are likely to
develop these types of cancers. Than women who are five
two or lower. So again, like as I said earlier,
each one of these studies uses a different metric for
what tall and short is, and this one apparently it's
five ten and five to uh. The explanation basically is

(15:36):
that tall women tend to have larger organs and subsequently
more cells, so their chance of developing a mutation that
leads to cancer is greater, and that this could ultimately
be their hormones influencing their risk of cancer. Okay, so
basically the idea is they have more dice to roll,
and therefore there's a greater chance they're gonna they're gonna

(15:57):
roll to one on one of those dis Yeah, which
I'm not sure. I don't know if that lines up
with like my the math that I remember for like
the g R E. But but well, let's go on.
We'll see if they've got some more stuff here. One
study of this used data from the Women's Health Initiative,
which is the study that was it took like a

(16:18):
broad look at women's health between at forty different clinics
across the United States, and even when they introduced controlling
factors like body weight b m I and socio economic status.
They found that there was a significant relationship between height
and cancer at any site in the body. Uh. And

(16:38):
for them, they said that for every additional ten centimeters
or three point nine four inches of height that a
woman had, she was one point one three times more
likely to have cancer, basically be at risk for cancer overall,
they weren't narrowing in on any of these specific cancers. Then,

(16:58):
Swedish academics just last year back this up with a
study that found that the taller you are, the more
likely you are to develop cancer. So for men, they
included men here, so it wasn't just you know, we're
looking at two different genders. Here the risk increases eleven
percent for every extra ten centimeters of height, while for

(17:21):
a woman it was actually eighteen percent for every ten
centimeters of height. So okay, so if we look at
these and it's two separate studies, I'd say, all right,
in this case, it seems that we have to tally
up that cancer is more likely and taller people, so
you're more likely to get cancer than I am. But

(17:41):
then again we're dealing with a general indicator here very much,
and there of course a number of other indicators for
for the risk of developing cancer. Yeah, like whether like
if I live next door to Chernobyl, right, yeah, yeah,
small shorter person smoking, taller person smoking, etcetera. So all right,
let's look at blood clots next. And the reason why

(18:02):
those are important is because they can potentially lead to strokes.
So another study found that if you're five ft two
or under in your weight. Now remember in most of
these your weight has to be close to normal for
your height, Like you can't be either super skinny or
morbidly obese and have that height that that's going to

(18:22):
throw the calculations off. But if you're a normal weight
and you're five to your three times less likely to
get a blood clot. And this is because blood must
be pumped a longer distance in taller people, which may
lead to reduce flow and an increased risk for a
stroke causing clot. Okay, well that makes sense. It's just

(18:44):
basically it's just business essentially. Yeah. Um, Now, while height
is associated with blood clots, a two thousand to study
looked at ten thousand Israeli civil servants and it found
that height was associated overall with stroke risk, not just
the blood clots, but just stroke risk overall. Being taller

(19:04):
was not good a Scandinavian study. The Scandinavians seem to
be looking into this a lot, probably because I mean,
we assume that they're taller than us. But they found
that taller people are two point five times more likely
to develop venus thrombo embolism, which this collectively covers both
deep van thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms. Now, in this study,

(19:27):
men over five eight were two point five seven times
more likely to develop recurrent blood clots. If they were
also over rate, that rose even more up to five
point to eight times. So okay, So again, looks like
we've got to put tall people on on the list
as being more likely to get blood clots and strokes.

(19:49):
Sounds like, okay, man, this isn't looking good for you, buddy. Alright,
what about your heart? How's your heart feeling? Pretty good?
Pretty good? I have heart problems, not like major stuff,
but like I had a mitro valve prolapse when I
was a kid, and it's like a thing that I
have to get checked up on four occasionally. Just means
like one of the valves flaps differently than than the

(20:10):
other three valves. But um, I don't know. Let's see,
let's roll the dice. All right, Tall people are less
likely to develop heart disease, all right. There, For every
two point five inches taller you are than someone else
of your same gender, your risk of heart disease actually
diminishes by four. So in the study that looked at this,

(20:33):
researchers actually measured the association between DNA variants and height
as well, so they weren't just like measuring people and
then looking at their medical histories. They're actually looking at
their DNA And what they found was that the association
between heart problems and height was actually small. But then
they combined it with the overall associations that they had

(20:54):
from other data, and they still found that genetically determined
height was at risk of coronary heart disease. So before this,
observational studies had basically suggested that there was a link
between shorter height and coronary heart disease. So this one's
a little confusing to me. I don't know, Maybe it
plays out in the end like it's kind of an equalizer.

(21:16):
But we got another study here that says a review
of fifty two separate studies, So this is one of
those meta studies, it found that of more than three
million people, the shorter ones had a fifty percent higher
risk of deadly heart disease than tall ones. And additionally,
the genes associated with being short also increases the risk

(21:37):
of having high L d L cholesterol levels. Okay, so
this isn't looking good for short people in terms of
heart stuff. And one more study related to this said
men who were taller than six one, so that's you,
had a thirty five percent lower risk of having a
heart attack than men who were shorter than five seven

(22:00):
And every inch a man gains subsequently results in a
two to three percent decrease in heart attack risk. That's interesting,
but there, as far as I could tell, there was
no like speculation as to why. Now this is another
one of those instances where I have to have to
to say that I feel like I have a warped
sense of percentages and and likelihood. You know, if scenarios

(22:24):
taking place based on rolling dice in D n D
and playing x com you have like a hit on
an alien and and you end up missing or even
like um like stuff like that, I feel like has
kind of warped my understanding of percentile. Well, what if
like in the in that situation, right, I mean, people

(22:45):
statisticians out there are going to be screaming at us.
But but in that situation, if you're playing the game
and the alien is at a high enough level that
even your cent isn't enough to allow you to hit it,
then subsequently, I mean, so if you apply this to hell,
then it's like if you have something like I put,
extremely dangerous form of coronary heart disease. Right, no matter

(23:09):
what your stats are, no matter how tall you are,
you're still going to roll with like a negative two.
This always reminds me of a quote from The Naked
Gun Leslie Nelson uh Flick. I'd like to think of
it as an O. J. Simpson movie. Okay, well, it's
about the the O. J. Simpson character Nordburg, where where
this character says, doctors say that Nordberg has a fifty

(23:29):
fifty chance of living, though there's only chance of that.
So I like the percentage upon percentage and ultimately making
it just completely nonsensical. Yeah, And I mean, like, no
disrespect to the people who are conducting these studies, but
when you see them all lumped together like we're doing here,
it kind of feels like that. It feels like, for instance,

(23:49):
like the heights are all over the place, the percentages
are there's a lot of shifting around here. And what
we're doing here today is clearly not academic in any
sense of the term. You know, we're not using any
like statistical models to try to put all these together.
We're just basically using fast and loose D and D rules. Right, yeah, well,
we're we're not trying to make an actual um argument

(24:11):
for you know, a tall person or shorter shorter persons
of chances of of survival, but ready providing an overview
of what some of the studies we're saying. But so far,
let's recap. So, Robert's more likely to get cancer taller people.
Taller people are more likely to have strokes and clots.
Shorter people are more likely to have heart disease. What

(24:33):
about your lungs? Now, this was the study that got
us on this track. So, according to a twenty fifteen
study that was presented at the American Thoracic Society International Conference,
lung transplant candidates who are about five three or shorter
have to actually wait a longer time for their transplants

(24:53):
than taller candidates, and they're more likely to die within
a year of waiting for such trans plants. So this
is interesting. I have to assume that it's because of
size availability. Yeah, I mean it. This reminds us of
something that came up in our Cyborg one of our
Cyborg episodes, just talking about the size of artificial hearts,

(25:14):
I believe, and how initially they did not have like
they were sized for adult men, and therefore if someone
was like a smaller female or individual, just like someone
smaller than what was the ideal male size, they wouldn't fit. Yeah,
so I imagine it lines up with that. Uh. Yeah.
So they basically found that shorter adults are more likely
to be placed on mechanical ventilation and the median height

(25:38):
that they used was a hundred and seventies centimeters or
about five point six feet. They used a median b
m I of twenty five point four, which I don't
really know the b m I is very well, but
I looked it up on a chart and that actually
qualifies as overweight. Uh. Most of their participants were white
and male. That's important to remember as well too. So

(26:00):
all right, lungs sounds like shorter people are worse off brains.
What about your brains? This is a big one because
it's you know, if everything else is working, that's great,
but if the brain is not functioning properly as well, then, uh,
you know what's the point, right, Well, it turns out
that women who are five seven or taller are fifty
percent less likely to die from dementia than women who

(26:24):
are five one or shorter, and this has been attributed
to factors that contribute to smaller stature again, childhood illness, stress,
and poor nutrition. So what I'm getting out of this
is like, height isn't necessarily all that important, but like,
if you're a parent, it's pretty important that you make
sure your kids eating well and if they're sick, you're

(26:46):
taking care of them. Right. Um. Men, however, who are
taller than five ten, they had a fifty nine percent
lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than men who are
shorter than five six. So okay, So what we're seeing
here is that dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease, seems to be

(27:07):
more likely to show up in shorter people. So that's
me again, So I'm more likely to lose my mind
than you are. Which sounds about right. I mean, just
based on our daily you know, interactions, and and how
how with it? I am already at age forty. Well,
I feel like on this show, especially, madness is always

(27:29):
a risk. This is very true, and we knew what
we were getting into when we signed up for it.
What about diabetes, This one didn't even cross my mind. Yeah,
but of course this is a big one. This is
one of This is one of the big killers today.
This is a primary health concern. So type two diabetes,
most of us know, is linked to weight, but they
think that type one may actually be linked to height.

(27:52):
And the cause of type one is still unknown, but
it's thought to be related to an autoimmune attack on
the insulin producing cell of our pancreas. Now, a two
thousand to study that was published in the Journal of
Pediatrics found that taller children generally experience an increased risk
for the development of type one diabetes, except during infancy

(28:17):
or early adolescence. But then there's been other studies that
contradict this. Right, So, uh, there's another one that suggests
that children with diabetes are either all similar in height
or shorter than their non diabetic peers. So this one
seems to balance out, and that like, the studies don't
seem to uh come to a conclusion one way or

(28:37):
the other. So I think we can just like, we
can file this under null for now. I don't know
necessarily that you're more likely to get Type one diabetes
than I am, just based on height. Now, there's two
smaller ones here that I added at the end. The
first is about reproduction women who are taller, and again

(28:58):
totally like, I don't know why they picked these numbers,
but they chose five six for women who are taller.
Those women are less likely to develop gestational diabetes than
those who are shorter at five two or shorter. This
is speculated to be because the genes that are related
to height have an effect on their glue close tolerance.

(29:21):
Also a study in Thailand, which I don't know why.
I look my parents lived in Thailand for a while,
but anytime I hear a study in Thailand, I'm immediately like,
I don't know. A study in Thailand found that being
five one or taller reduces your risk of having to
have a C section. That seems to make sense to me. Well,
this one is interesting in terms of of what a

(29:44):
lot of the data said about about c sections over
the years, and they're they're those who argue that a
lot of times, I mean, c section is a is
a topic onto itself that we could we could easily
devote a whole episode two. But there are those who
make the charge that the decision to go the C
section is is times related to the culture of the hospital,
the cultural the culture of the medical profession. So I

(30:06):
can't help but wonder, like, when this comes up to
to what extent would this translate into an American hospital scenario,
say a Chinese hospital scenario, into uh, you know, areas
where there's more traditional child birth outside of a hospital,
et cetera. Huh, yeah, that's interesting. But I guess like,
if we take the two of these and we taly

(30:27):
them up, we can essentially say shorter people, by this metric,
are more likely to have reproductive problems. So I'm more
likely to have reproductive problems than you are, although neither
of us are women. But hey, you know, I could
play out in other male reproductive type problems. Last one,
this one makes total sense once I read it heat exhaustion.

(30:51):
So apparently the larger a person is, the more their
body has the ability to get hot because the surface
of their skin dissipates heat at a slower rate. Okay, yeah,
this is This is actually something that comes up in
the episode of the Joe and I did about human size,
because we get into the idea of like giant humans
and some of the problems with with heat that occur

(31:13):
when you start just proportionally building up a you know,
an organism spody. Yeah, you know this. I can't remember
when we did our episode on the science of ant man.
I don't think that came up, but that would be
an interesting thing to think about, Like when he's super tiny,
how much heat is he dissipating, versus when he blows
up to super big and he picks up an airplane

(31:34):
or whatever. So the idea here then is that larger
people are going to dissipate heat at a slower rate,
so they're more likely to get heat exhaustion, where shorter
people are able to lose heat more readily, so they're
less likely to get heat exhaustion. I've never thought about
that before, but I guess that's another one in my column.
So you are more likely to get exhausted in the

(31:55):
heat than I am. Like if you and I crash
landed in the desert somewhere and there's no water and
we were just walking for days. You're going to be
the one to drop before I'm gonna depend on you
to rebuild our airplane and fly us out of the
desert flight of the Phoenix stuff and totally do that.
All right, This is basically our rundown. This is our
rundown of physical stuff. Though, why don't we take a

(32:16):
break when we come back, We're gonna get into personality
and mental attributes. Thank alright, we're back. So, yeah, we
we've looked at some of the basic health studies out
there about the human height and where it where, where
it falls on the healthy less healthy scenario, your likelihood

(32:38):
for various diseases and whatnot. But yeah, what about human
height and personality and psychology. So height is a primal
survival signifier. It addresses physical strength, reach, health, and good nutrition.
And for this reason, it's not surprising the humans have
some natural tendencies when it comes to our our psychological

(32:59):
relates ship with human height. But this is this is
one of the problems too, because it's very well, we
don't want to reduce our her views of other humans
and our own like social scenarios to just oh, who's
the biggest person in this room all right there in
charge because they're the tallest, like like obviously, while those

(33:21):
factors might influence us, you know in the sort of
sort of in the background at the the rat like
high brain level, um, there's a lot more going on
with human personalities, uh, with with with just how we
interact with people. Sometimes the largest person in the room
need not be the person with the largest stature, you know,

(33:43):
it's sometimes just the person with the most personality or
the most you know, symmetrical features um, or the nicest
clothes that or you know, they have a reputation. There's
there's so much more going on with with how we
perceive other humans than just how tall are they. Yeah,
that's certainly true. Although I've definitely encountered in like my

(34:06):
business life. I guess that like the the stereotype of
like the tall guy assuming leadership or or assuming confidence
in a group. Yeah, I guess I haven't had a
lot of not you. Yeah, I mean I have not
assumed leadership here um, and neither has has easy our

(34:28):
our our tech expert um. So I don't know, I
don't know that it has to do with particular business
cultures or yeah, or maybe when you get an m
b A they put you on a rack and they
stretch you out, or is it one of these things
where a tall person gets promoted. It's kind of it's

(34:49):
like an attractive person getting promoted saying, oh, well, clearly
it's because they're so handsome, or clearly it's because she's
just really tall like you. There's a gut instinct to
reduce it to some thing that has nothing to do
with marin rather than actually, yeah exactly, rather than like
analyze your own like strengths and weaknesses in terms of meritocracy. Yeah.
That being said, there have been times where I have, like,

(35:11):
I'll have self doubt creeping in and I'll be like,
oh man, what if I've only gotten this foreign life
just because I'm a little bit tall, and if and
if I was just a little shorter, I would just
I would have fallen into the gutter years ago. No,
that's not true. But still you end up thinking about
these things when you start crunching some of these uh
at times very general studies. Yeah, yeah, no, I can

(35:33):
understand that I have this experience where I go to
shows a lot, or at least I used to. I
don't go as much as I as I used to go,
but I would often find myself watching a band, and
then I would if I would get bored with the band,
I would sort of pull out and pay more attention
to the audience and start thinking how tall am I

(35:53):
in comparison to everybody else in this room? And you know, like,
what's the sort of average height of fans of this
particular music or something like that, you know, and I'm
always somewhere in the middle. You know, they like five,
that's nothing special. Like in fact, when you looked at
h when we looked at these studies earlier, of like
all the various organs, like that height was neither really

(36:17):
listed as being the tall height or the short height.
It was always somewhere in between. So maybe I'm just
more likely to get everything. So speaking of getting things,
one of the classic tropes, right, is that the that
the tall guy gets the girl, where the tall girl
gets the guy or whatever your sort of heteronormative scenario
is kind of that whole. Uh, the cartoon scenario of

(36:40):
the the nerd on the beach with the with the lady,
and then here comes the big, tall, muscle bound dude
and you kick sand on him and ls off with
the gal flex Mentalo. Yeah, well there was there that
I did find a study that that touches on This
two thousand sixteen University of Edinburgh study published in Genome Biology,
and they conducted an analysis of the genotype of more

(37:02):
than thirteen thousand human heterosexual couples, and they found that
genes that determine your height also influence your choice of
mate by height. So, simply put, our genes can be
used to predict the height of our partner. Now there
are plenty of exceptions here, of course, and we can
all we all know couples where where you know one
significant other is uh is is tall, the other ones short. Um.

(37:25):
But this, this, this paper is making an argument that
we do tend to gravitate towards people who are similar
in their morphology. Okay, again from personal experience, this absolutely
aligns up with just like my subjective experience with other
people talking to them about who they're dating or why
they're dating. I know plenty of people who are tall

(37:46):
and say like, oh, there's no way that I could
date her. It just wouldn't work out. Or I know
tall women who have said the same thing, like like
he's nice and all, but just like there's such a
disparity between the two of us. I just can't imagine
just physical height. Yeah, yeah, that's like like an immediate
like I imagine like, uh, you and I are totally

(38:07):
off the market in terms of this kind of thing.
But when you use like Tinder or something like that,
like I assume height is part of the like statistics
that you have to report. So I hadn't even thought
of that, because certainly a head shot you're not gonna
be able to tell. Most photos you're probably not going
to tell. To be able to tell, we'll have to
ask somebody in the office who uses Tinder or grinder
or something like that. But I would assume that it

(38:28):
would have height and weight included in there. Well, this
is an area I'd love to hear from listeners on
two total experience with this, especially as it plays out
in the modern you know, dating scenario. But some people
would be like whoa, that person's five to nope swipe,
or or oh that person is like only an inch
taller than me, or some people like to have somebody
who's taller than them but only a little taller than them.

(38:49):
Do you think they're taggling room? Do you think they're
like five tens a bit much? If you can bring
it down to five eight, then we'll give it a shot.
Here's what I really think, And this is going to
reveal a lot more about me and not about the study.
But I have had lots of friends who have gotten
excited about the prospect of hooking up with somebody who's
either significantly shorter than them or significantly taller than them,

(39:13):
but not having a relationship with that person. So the
idea of the experience is okay. But when they're actually
like searching around for a partner, they're more likely to
have this scenario of like, you know, figuring out the
sort of math of like how they're going to line
up against one. So it's one thing to have this
fantasy in mind, but it's another thing to to have

(39:36):
to think, well, where, what where would we put things
on shelves and how would that work out? Yeah, now,
earlier you touched on the income height scenario, and there
is a highly sited two thousand four study even the
Journal of Applied Psychology by Timothy a judge and Daniel M. Cable,
and they did an investigation of the correlation between height
and success. So quote, the findings suggests that someone who

(39:58):
is six ft tall earns that average nearly sixty six
thousand more during a thirty year career than someone who's
five ft five inches, even when controlling for gender, age,
and weight. So that's an interesting observation. Uh, but again
it's kind of problematic. I feel you start actually teasing
it apart. Uh, Is it really a situation where even

(40:20):
in the background of cognition, someone's thinking, oh, that's a
tall one. Make sure we give them a raise because
they can crush me with their giant hands. I don't
know if it's that so much as that going back
to that, uh, that idea that we sort of started
off the episode with, which is like, well, tall people
must come from at least middle class families because they

(40:40):
were able to be raised with a nutritious environment and
they didn't have disease to which got them to this
point in life. Subsequently, they must have a history that's
led them to be responsible enough to get a promotion
or something like. I guess it would be more likely
to be that, but even that seems absurd when I
think about it out loud. Yeah, speaking of things that

(41:01):
sound a bit absurd. Uh. There's also a two thousand
sixteen study out of Ohio State University that argues, based
on British data, that the taller person is, the more
likely he or she is to support conservative political positions,
support a conservative party, and and actually vote for conservative politicians.
They found that a one inch increase in high increased

(41:23):
support for the Conservative Party of Written by point six percent,
and the likelihood of voting for the party by point five.
That one strikes me as very odd. I can't see
any correlation. Yeah, I wonder, well, this is British data.
I wonder if the heighth factor has anything to do

(41:44):
with aristocracy and certain family lines. I guess. I mean
you're getting back to that that idea that al right,
if someone is tall, that means they've had good nutrition,
good good genetics, and access to healthcare. But that's not
always the case. And then and then it's not like
they're not like tall liberal academics and and and tall

(42:05):
pretty leaning. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, So this
one is it's hard for me to to really break
down and I feel like I end up thinking of
individuals in my life and all right, well, here's a
tall person, how did their politics line up with my
with my politics? Uh, this one feels weird. I'm having

(42:26):
a hard time really breaking this one down in terms
of just sort of interpersonal connections. Yeah. Yeah, that one,
I don't know. We have we have more, yes, right? So? Yeah?
And the in fact, the next one is awesome from
Ohio State two thousands sixteen study as well. They found
that tall people have built in advantage when it comes
to spatial relations. Uh, and that visual superiority holds true

(42:50):
even when tall people sit down and their shorter counterparts
stand on a box restool like an apple box. Yeah. So,
and then this one, this one is published in Science Advances.
Yeah so, I guess I hadn't really thought about this one, because,
if anything, I would have guessed the taller people. Or
maybe this is the problem with with perspective, Like I'm

(43:12):
not good at sports or throwing things and making them
go where I want them to go, so I would
have the tendency to fall into the trap of assuming
this is the universal experience, despite the fact that there's
plenty of evidence that you know, obviously we have plenty
of of of tall basketball players who are exceptional at
throwing objects and making them go where they want them

(43:32):
to go. Yeah. Yeah, And I guess to like, the
thing that I end up thinking about with this is
the thing that I end up thinking about with this is,
for instance, really tall people taller than you even like,
for instance, my father in law is a pretty tall guy,
and so is my brother in law. Like, the idea
of them having like a spatial advantage seems ludicrous to

(43:53):
me because like whenever they have to get into like
a sedan, it's like, you know, a complete hassle, like
their heads touching the roof the whole time, or they're
bending their neck or something like that. So I mean,
I guess like it's a spatial advantage of terms of
like do they need to get something down off of
the top of a shelf or something, But like yeah,
or or I have noticed this that I can Uh,

(44:16):
there are parts of the house, like the top of
the refrigerator. Um, I'm the only one who can see
on the top of the refrigerator without standing on something.
So I'm the only one who noticed that notices it
notices that it needs dusting. Yeah, so that's like the
only example of the spatial advantage that I have, and
it just ties into laziness concerning the dusting of the house. Sure, sure, yeah, yeah,

(44:36):
I don't know. That's strange to me because I a
lot of the people I know who are very tall
are do complain about like, well, either these chairs aren't
exactly made from my body type, my morphology, you know, uh,
or whatever else in the universe, you know. Um, I
imagine that there's just like a certain average height that

(44:58):
is shot for when you're like constructing I don't know,
like a car and how how tall that goes, or
particular kinds of chairs or ladders, or or how tall
refrigerators are. Yeah. So I'd love to hear tall, taller,
and shorter people comment on their spatial relationships. Uh uh,
you know when they ride into us. All right, So

(45:19):
we have one more area to discuss here, and that
is the idea of a Napoleon complex. Uh, shortman syndrome.
You're you're familiar with this idea, I am. But you
know what's funny is that whenever I refer to somebody
as having a Napoleon complex, I'm never referring to their
actual height. It's usually more about their personality, although I
know that obviously the term came from the idea that

(45:40):
Napoleon was short, right, Yeah, I mean that's that's the
basic idea here, is that a shorter person is allegedly
fueled by boastful, aggressive, and possessive motivations to make up
their lack of physical stature. And and you're mentioning that
your your use of it has often come down to
more of a like like they're they're boastful, and they're
they're rested because there's some there's something some insecurity, and

(46:04):
regardless of whether it's height or not, they've got the
Napoleon complex that leads to these characteristics. Yeah, but I'm
you know, I've probably been using it wrong. Well, no, no,
I I this is interesting because when we come to height,
what I mean, we we use it in strange ways
all the time. Like you talk of some you speak
of someone like Einstein and and you know, you might

(46:24):
describe him as a giant, Oh, he was a giant
of his time, or talk talk about the sciences in general,
about proceeding on the backs of giants. So that's interesting,
and we end up applying sort of you know, figurative
stature to to individuals just on the basis of, say,
their intellectual merit. So what I think I'm getting out
of this is that just like humanity in general, for centuries,

(46:48):
have gotten used to the idea of using height as
a barometer basically for personality and for health. But in
the last tree, we've really gotten to a point where
healthcare has revealed that it's not necessarily the factor. There's
a lot else that's going into it. But at the

(47:10):
same time, like our language, our culture hasn't really caught
up to that yet, right, Yeah, I think that's a
good read on what's going on here now In terms
of the the Napoleon complex itself. The term was coined
by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in uh and it's it's
all ready to observe because by most accounts, Napoleon Bonaparte,

(47:31):
famed a French leader, was five six or five seven,
perfectly normal height for the day, really a perfectly normal
height for to day. But is there any truth to
to any of this? Is it all just a matter
of height? Is m Is it? Just like you said,
our our culture and language not quite catching up with
this new balance of of of height and health is there?

(47:52):
You know, it's is there? Is it just a stupid
label for which a short person is aggressive while if
a tall person is acting aggressive and it's just hey,
they're just that's perfectly natural. Of course they are either
tall and aggressive. And I have to say that I
never put much stock in it myself because it's it's
so cartoony. It it literally makes me think of like
a cartoon small dog yapping and jumping around. Yeah. So

(48:14):
I looked into it, and there are a few studies
that that examine the Napoleon complex. Uh. There's a two
thousand four study titled Personality Functioning the Influence of Stature,
and this is published in the Archives of Disease in
Childhood and it used the Wessex Growth Study using forty
eight short normal and sixty six control participants to tackle
the question. And they found no significant effect of recruitment

(48:37):
height or final height on the Adult Personality Functioning Assessment
score or on any of the underlying domain scores. So
what they found is that socioeconomic status has the biggest
effect on the total score, on employment, on education, on
coping domain scores as well. So quote no evidence was
found that stature per se significantly of factor the functioning

(49:01):
off the participants in these areas as young adults. So, alright,
something just popped in my head, which is another sort
of generalism that people make about Americans. I'd say, uh,
and I'm guilty of this as well, but the idea
that most Americans are very uncomfortable talking about class, specifically
socioeconomic status. Uh. And this is why, like, for instance,

(49:24):
you have studies that show that, like, people who are
metrically in the upper class think of themselves as being
in the middle class, and people who are metrically in
the lower class think of themselves as being in the
middle class. Right, everybody wants to be in the middle class. Um.
Maybe this is subsequently, why we just keep going back
to height, is because it's a lot easier to talk about, well,

(49:47):
Robert's tall and Christians medium size, right, rather than saying, like, well,
you know, we have a clear like class delineation problem,
and the people who have the more money or mora
likely to be healthy. And that's you know, basic human
right that seems like it should extend to everybody, right,
So I'm kind of curious how much that plays into

(50:09):
it like all this talk about height really seems to
be avoiding the socioeconomic factor that keeps coming back in
over and over and over again. Now there's a two
thousand seven study and this came from the University of
Central Lancashire, and this study actually found the reverse of
the Napoleon complex. The tall men were more likely to
lose their temper than short men. They explored this via

(50:32):
what they called the chopstick game. And this is kind
of hilarious, in which men of different heights dueled with
wooden sticks, but one of the subjects deliberately provoked the
other by wrapping them across the knuckle. Okay, so and
in this scenario, like the knuckle rappers here, they have
been preconditioned to do this. They're saying, look, we're gonna

(50:52):
have this scenario. We're gonna go in there and start
chop sticking around, but just whack the hell out of
this guy's knuckles. Um. And this was a very small study,
so it wasn't like a complete battle royale, but you
have ten men of average height and the same number
below five ft five uh. And they found that the
taller men were more likely to lose it over these Shenanigans. Quote,
the results were consistent with the view that small man

(51:15):
syndrome use a meth. That's fascinating. I mean, that's a
really small sample study and I'm assuming it's you know,
it's only within that specific area too, But it's interesting.
I just love the idea that's like such a farcical uh,
like like comedy waiting to happen. Like I would love
to watch like a video of the proceedings where it's

(51:37):
just like small men whacking tall men on the on
the knuckles with chopsticks of all things. Yeah, it seems
like a strange indicator of like overall personality. To what
extent you were offended by, like someone essentially physically assaulting
here or going a little too far. I think I
would just start laughing. Yeah, but hey, I'm only five nine,

(51:59):
all right. And then final study here, this one came
from Professor Abraham Bunk of the University of Granigan in
Holland and here are you the opposite in two thousand
and eight, So the researchers question a hundred men and
a hundred women in relationships about their their levels of jealousy,
their feelings of jealousy, and how interested they believe their
partners to be in other members of the opposite sex.

(52:21):
And this seems to be zeroing in on like one
aspect of the supposed Napoleon complex, the idea that that
shorter men are going to be more possessive and more jealous.
So they found that five ft four inch men scored
an average of three point seven five out of six
on a jealousy scale, while men around six six they

(52:41):
scored two point to five on the jealousy scale. Now
the female results were more complex. So you have average
heighted women, they were scoring lowest out of everybody, getting
a three out of six on the jealousy scale. The
tallest though women at six ft they got a four
out of six. And the shortest women they scored the
best of all. They got, you know, a five feet tall,

(53:03):
they got five out of six. So the short women
were the least likely to be jealous. They were the
most confident of all of these participants. Yeah, man, it
seems like the way to go is to be a
short woman when you look again, like back at the
Japanese women who live the longest there I think, if
I remember correctly from the data earlier in the episode

(53:24):
four nine on average, and then these ladies very confident. Yeah,
I don't know. They said this was one of their
their core findings. Quote, short men were, as expected, most
jealous in the presence of powerful, tall, strong, and rich
potential rivals. So this is not a study to you know,
govern your behavior in life choices, but it it uh,

(53:46):
it's it's interesting in that it it presents the one
study that I could find that argued in favor of
at least some level of of shortman syndrome or Napoleon complex. So, Okay,
we've looked at the mental attributes, We've looked at the
physical attributes, We've cracked all these numbers. We've thrown around

(54:07):
metrics of height, uh and death and rates of mortality.
Now what have we come to a conclusion on Well,
I think we've come to the conclusion that, yes, in
certain scenarios, especially with health, you can point to high
as it as as an indicator, as a partial indicator

(54:28):
among many other indicators about what might happen with your body.
But on its own, I think I agree with that
study that we present at the top, that it's an
unreliable predictor. You can't just say well, because somebody is
this tall, they're less likely to do X, Y and Z,
or they're more likely to die from A B and C. Uh.

(54:50):
It just seems like what we should really be paying
attention to is nutrition, and socioeconomics does seem way more important. Yeah. Likewise,
with you with the psychological stuff, I really like what
you said earlier that it seems like it's largely this
idea that we do have some some primal instincts in
judging an individual by height. But those those those primal judgments,

(55:11):
even though they may pop up to varying degrees in
modern living. Uh, it's a far more complicated scenario now
thanks to all the additional layers of human culture. Ye. Well,
that said, I have tallied up our results, and you
scored three and I scored four. So I am more

(55:33):
likely to die at a younger age than you are,
based on this very informal study that we've done here today. Uh. So, hey, guys,
I'll see I'll see you when I see you. Yeah, Well,
this means you have to do the follow up episode
after I die, after you die, yeah, which is about

(55:53):
how it was an unreliable predictor No, no no, no, because
I'm gonna die first, right, No, I'm gonna I've got
to do the podcast. You It'll be you and your
new co host will be seven feet tall. Yeah, well
it's gonna be a robot son telling Yeah, exactly a
lot of people don't know this, but Carney is very tall.
They usually imagine it was like a short robot with
like a mailbox for ahead, but he's he's massive. We

(56:14):
haven't really reached up there. He's like the robot on
that that Queen album cover that's crushing the band members
in their hands. He's imposing. Yeah. Okay, Well, if this
was interesting to you and you're thinking, well, wait a minute,
I'm a tall person or I'm a short person. This
doesn't line up with what I thought I knew about myself.
Tell us your experience, you know, i'd like to know,

(56:36):
have you experienced a Napoleon complex? Do you know about
any specific physical ailments that you feel like are you're
more likely to have because of your stature? Let us
know the best way to do that is to reach
out to us on social media where we are on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and Instagram. That's right, and uh and as always you

(56:57):
can find is that the mother Ship had Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com on That's where you'll find
all the podcast episodes, you'll find videos, you'll find blog
post links out to those social media accounts. Like we mentioned,
everything is there, and if you just want to write
us a sweet, long letter the old fashioned way, you
can reach out to us at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and

(57:29):
thousands of other topics, is that how stuff works dot
com