The good news: Indians are genetically a pretty tall race, and should probably jump to an average height of 5'9-5'11 in a few generations (most studies show the avg is 5'9-5'10 in 2000s cohorts)
The bad news: Indians are 100% genetically predisposed to be skinny-fat.
The bad news: Indians are 100% genetically predisposed to be skinny-fat.
The first one is somewhat obvious when you realize Indian Hunter Gatherers (AASI) were around 5'11-6'0 on average. The Indus Farmers were around 5'7.5 and the Steppe Aryans were 5'9.
It won't go away totally. It's a deep mesolithic adaptation due to the equatorial climate of the subcontinent. (lower lean mass = less body heat = less thermal load). There is empirical research to back this up too.
It actually has nothing to do with caste, the AASI were very tall but lanky themselves. Low lean mass has been characteristic of the subcontinent for 12,000 plus years now. It's a climatic adaptation. See this graph for example. Mesolithic AASI had low lean mass too.
No, it's definitely true. The good thing as I said is that while you cannot grow taller, you can workout regularly and eat a meat based diet to gain a lot of muscle.
Ancedotally speaking, I think this makes a lot of sense too. Indian Zoomers in India are extremley tall, in North West India they're easily 178 cm on average. That's because they're one of the first generations of Indians to grow up not malnourished & with proper adequate diet.
However, most people would have noticed that these Indian zoomers develop a skinny fat or just skinny phenotype while some races like West Africans seem to just be naturally lean (this is also genetics). So if you're an Indian Zoomer, you need to workout regularly.
Speaking ancedotally, I'm a fairly tall guy (188-189 cm) but had never been very lean. When I first started working out with a black friend around 6 yrs ago, he seemed to gain lean muscle much easily and just maintained it without giving much of a shit about his diet.
But for me it was much harder, and even now it's hard to be as lean as him without putting in major effort on diet. It's been 6 yrs and now I'm pretty muscular but the fact does remain that when we both started, he blew me out of the water.
Yeah, it's the same in every Indian household. My grandfather was like 5'5, my father was 5'11 and I'm 6'2
Even today, around 40% of all Indian adults are literally stunted in growth due to malnutrition as children, and even today lot of kids are stunted
Even today, around 40% of all Indian adults are literally stunted in growth due to malnutrition as children, and even today lot of kids are stunted
Btw, I don't think Punjabis/Haryanvis are that much taller than rest of India. There is definitely a difference, but it's probably 1.5 inches at most. The thing is when you increase the mean by 1.5 inches, the entire bell curve shifts to the right. So you'll see more outliers
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