China vs Bhutan: 9 cm Apart! 🇨🇳🇧🇹
Whose men are taller: China or Bhutan? Average height of young men (age 18-19), 1914-2026.
China: men 161.0 cm (1914) → 175.7 cm (2019) → 177.6 cm (2026, estimate)
Bhutan: men 161.3 cm (1914) → 167.1 cm (2019) → 168.2 cm (2026, estimate)
What the number means: 175 cm = if you measured every young man in the country and took the average, you would get 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in).
Height is a mirror of childhood: good food, clean water and fewer illnesses let children grow to their full height. That is why richer, healthier generations grow taller - and why some countries stopped growing or even got shorter.
Average height = the mean standing height in centimetres of all young adults of a country, MEASURED by survey teams (not self-reported). Each year shows one generation at the age of 18-19: the value for 2000 is the height of people who were 19 in 2000.
Terms used:
- adult height: how tall people are once they stop growing (around age 18-20)
- birth cohort: everyone born in the same year; the chart follows one generation per year
- measured height: taken with a measuring rod by a survey team, not what people say about themselves
- estimate: a calculated value, not a direct measurement (here 2020-2026, from the same generation's height as teenagers)
Data: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), 'A century of trends in adult human height', eLife 2016 (people born 1896-1966, shown at age 18) and 'Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019', The Lancet 2020 (height at age 19, 1985-2019), joined without a jump. 2020-2026: estimate from the same generation's NCD-RisC height at ages 12-18 in 2019.
🎵 Music: Driving Groove
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