When Take That singer Gary Barlow recently posted a family photo online, it became an unlikely internet sensation.
For at 5ft 7in the 54-year-old star looked bizarrely small next to his son Daniel, 24, who towered over him at 6ft 2in.
Commentators questioned how Daniel was so tall given his dad’s stature – Gary is below the national average for a man (about 5ft 9in).
But perhaps there are tallness genes in his mother? Gary’s wife Dawn Andrews, who is a similar height to her husband, is certainly above the 5ft 3in UK average for women.
Numerous studies show that a person’s height can generally be predicted by how tall their parents are.
For the past half-century, standard international guidelines have recommended the use of ‘mid-parental height’ to predict how tall a child will grow.
Gary Barlow shared a picture of his family that sparked many internet memes due to the height of his son Daniel (far left)
This means that the child is expected to grow to the mid-point of their parents’ heights – thus if a child’s mum is 5ft 6in and their dad is 5ft 10in, then they will most likely be around 5ft 8in.
The result is then adjusted for sex, by adding 2.5in to predict a son’s height or subtracting 2.5in to predict a daughter’s height.
This calculation is based around the Tanner scale, introduced in 1969 by Professor James Mourilyan Tanner, a renowned British anthropologist and paediatrician.
Last year, this approach was reassessed by scientists in the journal Children, based on the growth statistics of more than 250 children – they concluded that this calculation was accurate in around three-quarters of children.
Another method of estimation is to double a child’s height at two (boys are usually a little taller than that figure and girls a little shorter) – because by this age most children have established the pace and rate that they will grow at, according to paediatric experts at the Mayo Clinic in the US.
Genes are not the whole story, however. Nutrition, hormones and environment can all have a significant impact on your eventual height.
And, in turn, the factors that affect your height may all influence your health, too.
Researchers now say that being tall or short can significantly affect your risk of developing serious conditions such as cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and endometriosis – as well as erectile dysfunction (more of which later).
Daniel Barlow’s towering height runs against the UK trend. Studies show that, in the UK, children’s growth is falling behind the rest of the developed world.
British five-year-olds are around 2.5in shorter than children of the same age in Europe, according to a 2023 study by an international group of health-science experts, NCD Risk Factor Collaboration.
Similarly, research by Imperial College London has found that global height ranking for the UK has worsened over the past 35 years, with 19-year-old boys falling from 28th tallest in 1985 to 39th in 2019, and 19-year-old girls from 42nd to 49th.
The Imperial team said the most important reason behind this is the lack of healthy nutrition and home environments in their school years.
Furthermore, they warned that this lack of growth can affect a child’s health for their entire life.
In healthy children who have a balanced diet, growth is primarily determined by their genes.
There are 145 potential ‘height genes’, according to a 2023 study in the journal Cell Genomics – these regulate the cells in the cartilage at the ends of children’s bones, affecting how tall they grow.
Take That singer Gary Barlow works out with his son Daniel
The cartilage cells multiply in areas of tissue called growth plates that sit near the ends of long bones, such as your legs and arms, and determine each bone’s future length.
When your growth is complete (generally by the age of 18 or 19 for boys, and 14 or 15 for girls), these plates are replaced by hard bone, but they may not reach their full potential if they are not fuelled properly.
Most of the negative health effects associated with height come from being tall, according to a wealth of recent research – and, ultimately, this may help to explain why one seldom sees very tall, very old people.
Thomas Samaras, a US biological anthropologist, reported this phenomenon back in 1992 in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation. He studied 3,600 baseball players and concluded that ‘as the men got taller, their average age at death dropped’.
‘It came out to be about one year less life expectancy per inch,’ he said. Numerous studies have since supported this link.
For example, a study of Sardinian soldiers found that those below approximately 5ft 4in lived two years longer than their taller brothers-in-arms, reported the journal Biodemography and Social Biology in 2012.
And another study, published in the journal Life Sciences in 2003, found that the shorter countries in Europe had 77 centenarians per million, compared with 48 per million in the taller countries.
One significant reason may be a raised risk of cancer among taller men and women.
For every 4in increase in height above average, cancer risk increases by 18 per cent in women and 11 per cent in men, reported researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in 2015. The researchers suggested that one possible reason is that taller people simply have more cells that could transform into cancer.
An alternative reason is that taller people are exposed to higher levels of growth hormones while young, and that these hormones could promote cancer development.
This latter idea is supported by Geoffrey Kabat, an eminent cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, whose research found that increased height was associated with a higher risk of all cancers – but particularly thyroid, rectal, kidney, endometrial, colorectal, colon, ovarian and breast cancers.
He suggested that the culprit could be insulin-like growth factor (IGF-I), which has been shown to cause cells to replicate themselves excessively – the primary stage of cancer – and which prevents such rogue over-replicating cells from killing themselves, which is one of our bodies’ first-line defences against cancer.
Meanwhile, tallness in men has been linked to an increased risk of developing aggressive forms of prostate cancer.
Researchers at Oxford University in 2017 found that every extra 4in of height above average increases a man’s risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer by 21 per cent and their chance of dying by 17 per cent.
Hearts are also at risk from loftiness in both sexes.
The most common problem is atrial fibrillation (AF) – an irregular heartbeat that increases the risk of heart failure and stroke.
A study by US cardiologists in the journal Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine suggested that the tallest 25 per cent of men have double the normal risk of developing AF.
In their 2014 paper, involving nearly 7,000 men over a 34-year period, they pointed to other research which has shown that having larger atrial valves (which sit between the top chambers of the heart) can more than quadruple a person’s risk of AF – and that taller people tend to have larger atrial valves.
A similar level of increased risk in women was found by a study at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in 2017.
It’s not all bad cardiac news for tall people, though – because they have a lower risk of heart attacks. The 2014 US study also showed that the tallest men reduced their incidence of heart attacks by more than a third compared with the shortest.
For each inch above average height, the men enjoyed a 3 per cent decline in risk. The researchers, from Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, found that taller women also had a lower risk of heart attack than shorter ones.
They suggested the difference may come from the fact that shorter people have coronary arteries that are smaller in diameter and thus have more risk of these vessels becoming blocked by clots.
Despite this advantage for men – along with the popular perception that they are more successful and sexually attractive – it appears that tall chaps are more likely than short ones to commit suicide.
A 1996 study by Wayne State University in Detroit showed that men shorter than 5ft 6in are particularly less prone to taking their own lives.
Researchers argued that this is because diminutive males generally have to develop effective psychological resilience skills when young, in order to compensate for their lack of stature.
Donal McNally, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Nottingham, says bone deterioration can be a major cause of shrinking rapidly with age
Meanwhile, being a tall woman brings a greater risk of endometriosis, a debilitating condition where womb-like tissue forms elsewhere in the body.
A 2020 study in the Annals of Human Biology suggested that the condition may have been sparked by raised levels of the female hormone oestrogen in puberty – oestrogen plays a crucial role in accelerating vertical growth during puberty and is also known to promote the growth of endometrial cells.
Shorter women have their own reproductive problems, too: for instance, they have a greater risk of gestational diabetes (high blood sugar during pregnancy), reported the journal Diabetic Medicine in 2013. Researchers found women in the shortest 25 per cent had a more than 60 per cent greater risk of gestational diabetes compared with women in the tallest 25 per cent.
And both short women and short men are at higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a 2019 study by the German Institute of Human Nutrition. The researchers suggested that this may be due to the fact that their small stature is generally associated with higher levels of fat in their liver – a significant risk factor for type 2.
Amid all these pros and cons of being short and tall, one thing seems certain – that we all start to lose height after the age of 30. Cumulative height loss from 30 to 70 averages out at about 1in for men and 1.5in for women. By the age of 80, it increases to 1.5in for men and 2.5in for women.
We don’t all lose inches at the same rate, however.
Bone deterioration can be a major cause of shrinking rapidly with age, says Donal McNally, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Nottingham.
‘People get crush fractures of their vertebrae, which is a side-effect of the bone-thinning condition osteoporosis.
‘If you are lucky, the vertebrae get shorter but don’t wedge themselves together. If you are unlucky and the vertebrae do get wedged together then you can develop the characteristic dowager’s hump.’
We can all help to stop these problems occurring, he stresses, by taking serious steps to prevent osteoporosis.
‘This can be done particularly effectively by taking regular light weight-bearing exercise, such as gardening, walking briskly and exercising with light weights.’
Thus the good news is that, whether we are tall or short, we can all take easy steps to retain what height we have.
