Whatever happened to tall Texans?

Changes over time in average height are an interesting example of nature and nurture of obvious possible relevance to speculations over the genetic and environmental manipulation of IQ.

One of the cliches of Golden Age Hollywood movies was that Texans were tall and that cowboys were long-legged.

For example, the 1953 movie The Tall Texan starred Lloyd Bridges (6’0”), whose sons were Jeff Bridges (6’1”) and Beau Bridges (5’9”).

My guess is that native Texans of a century or more ago did tend to be taller than their cousins in, say, Virginia, due to eating more meat. This is not to say that Americans in general weren’t pretty tall by European standards, but that out on the range in Texas, where beef was especially cheap, Americans grew especially tall.

Are Texans still really tall? A 2017 federal report of self-reported heights, the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, suggests that white Texans now tend to be rather short, especially compared to Upper Midwesterners:

It makes sense that places like Iowa with a lot of Dutch, who are now exceptionally tall in Europe, would tend to be tall in the U.S. Yet, the shortness of white Southwesterners suggests that the feds are getting some Hispanics or part Hispanics mixed in with whites.

So how tall are 100% non-Hispanic white Texans today? Hard to say… Still, it’s likely that the Texas advantage of a century ago from eating more beef has diminished.