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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

Per capita meat consumption is at more than 150% of the levels back then. By your own argument, we should cut back on meat, particularly chicken and beef.

https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-us-capita-meat-consump...

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Their argument is that height has increased as a result of the meaty and fatty diet. It's definitely a factor. If you look at height differences between South Koreans and North Koreans, for example, you will see the effect that nutrition can have on height.

South Korea's meat consumption per capita has also increased consistently since the Korean War.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-relationship-between...

The counter argument is that it's simply better nutrition increasing height and you can have better nutrition even without a lot of animal product (especially in 2022). It's not intrinsic to meat and animal fat.

This has been borne out in the data: access to high quality animal fat and amino acids is absolutely critical to achieve maximum height. You can even observe it in fossils from the early Holocene, as agriculture expanded (hunter-gatherer diet was overwhelmingly meat dominant), human stature shrank: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-heights-over-the-lo...

Only in late 19th/early 20th did European stature begin to return to natural levels from the Mesolithic.

This effect was seen in American Indians, too. When early Europeans arrived in America, the Great Plains tribes were the tallest people in the world, due to game animal (bison, elk, deer, etc)-centric diet:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529071125.h... https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets...

Other studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30823563/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X1...

This is correct, you don't need animal products specifically to get the height increase it's more about just getting a decent amount of protein along with associated vitamins and minerals for the mother during pregnancy and through the childs early life up to early adulthood.

With animal products it's basically just easier to reach this nutritional point at least when compared with more traditional plant based diets. Of course with modern plant based supplements and nutritional knowledge and food availability etc. you can more or less narrow the gap these days at least in a technical sense, but sometimes in the real world the problem can be getting the kids to actually eat enough protein if they are fussy eaters who decide they don't like a particular protein source (whether animal or plant based) or are filling up on nutritionally sparse junk food first.

I, too, enjoy eating meat.

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