China's 18-year-old males are now the same height as American 18-year-olds. Let that sentence sit for a moment. In 1985, the average Chinese boy was measurably shorter. Not marginally: substantially. The gap was the kind you could see in a crowd, feel at a doorframe, read in a population chart without squinting. Between 1985 and 2019, Chinese men experienced the largest height increase of any nation studied. Boys aged 7 to 18 grew an average of 7.6 centimetres in three decades. What happened in China between 1985 and 2019? Economic reforms. Rapid urbanisation. And a diet that shifted, quite deliberately and measurably, toward more animal protein. More meat. More dairy. More eggs. The traditional diet was rice-dominant: and rice protein, it turns out, is negatively correlated with height across populations. When Chinese families got wealthier, they bought steak. Their children grew. This isn't a coincidence. It's a controlled experiment that 1.4 billion people ran on themselves over thirty-five years. And their children are now eye-level with Americans.
