The rest of the world may literally raise their head to see them, but the Dutch - the tallest people in the world - insist it is not easy to be very tall. An official study by the Dutch statistical office, which found that the Dutch are shortening, is rather good news, even if it threatens to dethrone them from the first place.
At a meeting of the "Klub Lange Mensen" or "Club of the Tall", customers say that there are disadvantages to being taller than the rest of the planet. "I have always struggled with my height. "When I was 12, I was already the tallest in the class, taller than my teachers," said the club's 57-year-old president, Ellen Keuken. "And when I came in contact with the group it was a revelation. I felt intruder and now I belong somewhere ", notes Keuken, who is 1,90m.
At a bar near Shiphol Airport, club members dance and chat over their drinks and rejoice that there is a place where they do not stand out. Even by Dutch standards they are tall with club members having to be at least 1,90m tall (for men) and at least 1,80m (for women).
"We can talk by keeping eye contact. We do not need to crouch, we can look straight at the other ", comments the secretary of the group, Rob Lers-Cut with his imposing height of 2,11m.
Many of the club members say that being tall in the Netherlands today is an increasingly common phenomenon, despite the findings of a study by the National Statistics Office.
Dutch men born in 2001 are now 1,83m tall on average, one centimeter shorter than those born in the 1980s, according to the statistics service, while women born in 2001 are on average taller. 1,69m, ie 1,4 cm less than in 1980.
Even so, the Dutch remain the tallest people in the world - surpassing, on average, men in Montenegro, Estonia and Bosnia, and women in Montenegro, Denmark and Iceland, according to the agency. but that may change.
At the beginning of the 19th century the Dutch were short by European standards and began to grow taller from 1840 before ending up being the tallest with the generation of the 1950s.
The reasons "are very difficult to explain," says Gert Stulp, of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Groningen. "We know that if a country gets richer and gets better health care, better nutrition and fewer diseases, it increases the height of the people, as it did with the Netherlands," says Stimulus.
"Our diet is considered to be a cause, the Dutch drink a lot of milk." As for the loss of points? Immigration to the Netherlands is a major reason why people of non-Western descent are generally shorter, according to the statistics service and Stulp.
cnn.gr
