MANILA – A 100-year-long study that looked at height records of 18-year-olds showed that Filipinos are among the shortest people in the world.

The study, titled “A century of trends in adult human height,” was published last July 26 in the journal eLife and was produced by a team of nearly 800 scientists in collaboration with the World Health Organization.

It showed that Filipino women born in 1896 had an average height of 147.9 centimeters, ranking 164th out of 200 nationalities. Come 1996, the ranking of Filipino women plummeted to 199th spot despite the slight increase in average height to 149.6 centimeters.

Filipino men shared the same fate, ranking 195th and 192nd in 1896 and 1996, respectively.

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According to the study, the tallest men in the world were born in the Netherlands with an average height surpassing 182.5 centimeters. Latvian women, on the other hand, towered all other nationalities with an average height of 170 centimeters.

The shortest men and women were found in East Timor and Guatemala. Meanwhile, South Korean women and Iranian men have shown the biggest increases in height over the past 100 years.

More details about the study can be found here.