Steve has a modestly titled post up, Height and Weight, where he analyzes data from Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: 2003-2005 (PDF). This is government data on American men, women and children who are Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black and Mexican American. I invite readers to peruse the raw data themselves. Steve did a little comparison of various parameters for males and females of the three populations. I thought it would be illustrative to plot the distributions of some the metrics so as to illustrate more intuitively the variation within the populations (the X axis are percentiles). Half Sigma pointed to Steve's post, and the discussion is unsurprisingly vibrant. I think it's safe to assume there is "structure" in something like weight within these populations due to geography and SES. You can see this even in New York City, just start from Bergdorf Goodman (especially around the Holidays) and walk north and east into the Upper East Side. Mean BMI starts dropping. In any case, like Steve I thought focusing on the 20-39 demographic was convenient, in part due to the nature of the readership of this weblog. Here's the CDC's BMI Calculator.










The data I used is here.

Labels: anthropometry, Health, height, human biodiversity