by Jennifer Cox Longevity As a girl who’s almost six feet tall, I wasn’t thrilled with the studies I found saying that the taller you are, the shorter you’ll live (my above-average height has caused a few hindrances inmy life, especially when it comes to clothes shopping, and now it might mean that I will have a shorter life too? Ack!). There are a lot of things that are connected to how long we live, and we’ve been exploring them in this column for almost three years. It seems pretty clear why things such as green tea, superfoods, sleep and companionship will help to contribute to a longer life, but who knew that a predisposition such as your height could impact how many birthdays you have?! Over the last 100 years, studies have provided mixed results regarding the mortality and health of tall and short people (says sciencedirect.com, a site that publishes scientific studies). However, during the last 30 years, several researchers have found a negative correlation between greater height and longevity based on relatively homogeneous deceased population samples. Findings based on millions of deaths suggest that shorter, smaller bodies have lower death rates and fewer diet-related chronic diseases, especially past middle age. Shorter people also appear to have longer average lifespans in general. In 2013, a team of researchers led by Geoffrey Kabat of Albert Einstein College of Medicine published a study showing that each additional four inches of height increases the risk of all types of cancer by 13 per cent among post-menopausal women (Slate.com). Shocking, right? The same study also looked at how individual diseases are more common among tall people. American women taller than 5’ 6” suffer recurrent blood clots at a higher rate than shorter women and, in certain cases, taller people have been shown to suffer from more respiratory and cardiovascular problems. And then there’s cancer – height is associated with greater risk for most kinds of cancer, except for smoking-induced malignancies. So today, researchers have concluded that taller people do, in fact, live shorter lives (darn!). However, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, when studies on height and longevity startedmore than a century ago, researchers believed that taller people actually lived longer. In the early 20th century, height was indeed a reflection of better nutrition and hygiene, which increased longevity. However, once the studies were limited to otherwise homogeneous populations, a consensus emerged that short people are longer-lived (Slate). While we can’t do much about genetics (if you’re tall, you’re tall – there’s nothing that can change that), we can help to increase our lifespan by paying attention to other factors (things which we have looked at in previous articles). Diet, sleep, physical activity and stress all contribute to our overall health, and can therefore have a pretty major impact on how long we live. So, if you’re on the taller spectrumof the scale (ahem), perhaps you’ll need to take extra care of yourself, especially into older age. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, get seven-eight hours of sleep, exercise on a regular basis (cardio as well as strength training) and keep stress levels lower (maybe it’s time to retire from that high-stress job). All of these things can help you add years to your life, whether you’re five feet tall or seven! LONGEVITY AND HEIGHT CSANews | SPRING 2017 | 37
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