During the first presidential debate, Senator John McCain called
North Korea a “repressive brutal regime,” comparing life there
to living in a prison camp. And then he summoned a bizarre
statistic, saying that the average South Korean is three inches
taller than the average North Korean. Mr. McCain is correct that
there appears to be a growing gap in height between North and
South Koreans, likely due to poor nutrition and impoverished
living conditions. Studies of escapees from North Korea show
that those born after the partitioning of the Korean Peninsula
in the North were consistently about two inches shorter than
their counterparts in the South, according to a 2004 report in
Economics and Human Biology. While the conditions for North
Koreans are troubling, Americans have a similar height gap to
worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard
of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last
summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly reported that
Americans are, quite literally, fa