A video by a content creator explaining the science of height in humans has been making the rounds online, based on a claim that sounds strange: the best way to determine if a country’s living standards are really increasing is not to look at its GDP, but to see how tall its people are. The video’s creator claims that height is “not just genetics,” and that, although your genes determine the tallest you could ever be, whether you actually reach that height is almost entirely dependent on what happens to your body in the first roughly 1,000 days of life, which is to say, from conception to age two. “Undernutrition or repeated infection in that window,” she says, “causes the body to stop investing in leg growth first, permanently shaving inches off adult height.”
