I was recently in a conversation with my gf and we got into a discussion about the cultural relativity in how people in different cultures and societies views beauty and the subject of the size of a woman’s hips was raised. She showed that in Korean society, the attractive female is one who has a slim waist, and skinny, long legs. I guess the best example is with the picture to the right.

Of course she also added that being tall is also very important. So it seems like the Korean ideal for attractiveness is height and skinniness, something which most other Western countries and their modeling and fashion industries also agree with.

However, I felt that there was something critical missing in the argument. In general, we know that to be skinny, most young girls actually sacrifice a lot of potential height from going on diets, not eating properly, and having some form of eating disorder, whether bulimia or anorexia.

I have always believed that to be skinny and stay skinny, it has to be a habitual lifestyle, since I have found that most people when asked love food and have an incredible desire for food. This would imply that for a person to be that skinny in their adult years, the habits which would lead to this type of body type had to have been developed when they were younger, probably during the years when they still had their open growth plates. If this was the case, any type of intentional restriction of food and nutrition would lead to height growth stunting.

So I showed that it may not be possible to ask for both height and skinniness. The smart person would instead choose to focus on eating as much nutritious and high protein food as possible while they were still growing into physical maturity. Once they have reached the maximum natural height after growth plate closure, they can then start focusing on food restriction diets to decrease the width size. Like I will always say, you can change a person’s weight a lot easier than changing their height. Focus on getting the maximum height first, and then focus on trying to skinny up.

While I was making this first main point I thought about another idea which I wanted to propose, similar to a very old post I did about Michael Phelp’s torso to leg lengths, which are disproportional, entitled “Torso Length To Leg Length , A Personal Theory“. This is the theory…

Women with wider hips can give birth to and result in bigger and taller children, which will thus lead to bigger and taller adults. 

We must remember that on average, European and North A merican Caucasian females have wider hips than East Asian females due to lifestyle choices, eating and diet habits, etc. in the modern world. The “white” women you would find from the rural towns of Iowa or Nebraska I would guess has a larger and wider hips than the urban “asian” girls you might find in Asian cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. I would next propose that the height of these “white” women from Iowa and Nebraska may be around 1-2 inches taller than the women you find in rural asian countries.

If the hips of a women are bigger, by the law of a proportional body, we can say that the uterus of the female should be also bigger.  As a correlary, we can thus infer that the bigger uterus can carry a bigger baby inside it before it is time for the final gestation process, ie. giving birth.

The best example I can think of is the case of Yao Ming. Yao was born to a mother who was either 6′ 2″ or 6′ 3″ and to a father who was around 6′ 7″-6′ 9″. Obviously he had the genes for height working for him from the beginning. I remember reading an anecdotal story about the fact that Yao’s grandfather was supposedly the tallest man in all of Shanghai during a certain early 20th century period. If we use the law of proportion, we can say Yao’s mother had great height, so she had a larger waist hip, which resulted in a larger uterus, so she had the capacity to carry a bigger baby.

I have been finding studies which show the endochondral ossification of long bones process in both prenatal (before birth) and neonatal (after birth) are different. It is well known that the human embryo into fully functioning human grows the fastest while is it still in it’s mother’s womb, the prenatal stage. Once the baby comes out of the mother’s uterus, womb, the growth rate drops as it goes through the younger years, until the growth rate increases slightly during the puberty years. This would suggest then that for women who have the bigger uterus/womb, they will be able to hold their baby slightly longer, giving them a slightly higher chance to grow more before birth. From Yao Ming’s  unofficial biography, “Operation Yao Ming” we find out that Yao came out as a very large baby, at  11 lbs and in the corridors of Shanghai No. 6 Hospital on the evening of Sept. 12, 1980. It was shortly after 7 p.m. (source) Yao weighed more than twice as much as the average Chinese newborn. When we look at the growth rate of Yao, we can see that overall, his growth rate was not really higher than other kids or abnormally higher. it is just that Yao came out a lot bigger than other babies. So, the raw initial amount of mass and cell # was far more to work with. This would be the product of either the fact that his mother’s body and womb is bigger than other Chinese females, or the fact that his mother and father’s height genes are at work, or both.

The next example would be the case of Karan Singh, who we looked at before in the post entitled “Tallest Toddler In the World – Karan Singh“. Karan just “happened” to be born to one of the tallest females in the world. His mother is Shweatlana Singh, who has been billed as Asia’s tallest woman. However that fact comes into contention because on the website The Tallest Man she is listed and measured before at “only” 6’8″. His father is also tall at 6′ 7″. As for Shweatlana, she claims that she is around 7′ 2″. She states about her boy…’He was born big and is already half as tall as me, so I believe he will outgrow me soon,’ said ShweatlanaKaran, who was twice the size of normal babies at birth – 13lb and 2ft – never fitted baby clothes and now wears clothes designed for children three or four times his age. (source)

What we see is that Karan was born to a women who is taller and probably has bigger and wider hips that Yao Ming’s mother. Karan was born at a weight more than Yao Ming and his growth rate is also high. I would guess that Karan would end up taller than Yao in 10 years. His mother who has billed herself as the tallest women in Asia showed us that Karan was born big, and that his growth rate is not from a higher growth rate after birth. It seems to be the same case as Yao Ming.

The last example I can give would be from the Giantess Anna Haining Swan, or Bates, who was around the 7′ 5″ range. Her husband was equally big at maybe around 7′ 3″. They had one baby would was recorded at the highest baby birth weight ever at over 23 lbs and over 30 inches tall but the baby did not survive. If the baby had survived, we would have seen a possible 9 feet tall human being.

There is a rule of thumb in medicine that says that the height of a the baby at the age of 2 would be approximately half the height of its ultimate adult height. Using this rule of thumb, we can say that an individual’s final adult height is a function or dependent on it’s height at age 2 ~ FH=f(H2)~FH=2*H2

This would suggest that overall, every human being goes through an overall normal growing process, with very few people, even true giants being given higher rates of height increase. The fact remains that they just were born bigger, with more cells to replicate. If we then use inverse logic, we can say that the reason the babies were born bigger and had more cells to replicate is because their mother’s had larger wombs and could carry a bigger baby. Since taller women in general have bigger wombs due to proportion, we can make a rather common sense argument that taller females give birth to bigger babies.

However, I feel that the critical step or element is that the final height of an individual is determined at its original cause to be the fact that the mother had wider hips, which allowed for a bigger, wider womb.