re: The size of the average American WW2 soldier compared to today’s average American male

My grandfather credits his height for saving his life in WWII. He grew up in rural Alabama and was 6’2”. He said they got shipped to England in 1943 and were training when they came around looking for MPs. At the time he was an equipment operator and they wanted big guys to be MPs so they took him.

He said his job was to go in after the infantry went through to police the towns, so he didn’t get shot at until he came back home and became a cop in his hometown.

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90+ percent were malnourished during childhood

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This is absolutely verifiable. It's one of the reasons that the Nordics ended up with doomslaying 1000lb deadlifters, and the French are... Well, French. The Nordics didn't have so much of their gene pool wiped out in WWI. The oddity some will claim is the Eastern Europeans in recent age, even with food restrictions. However, I think they succeeded because they've been invaded so many times, they are all about MMA in the general populace, etc. Poland is one place where being near six feet and two hundy makes you feel small. Then, there is also the fact that Stalin and others killed so much of the potentially weak population, that it refined the gene pool.

We had to design new parachutes for troops that got to eat meat more than once a week. But, bonus, you can carry a heavier ruck.

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That’s depressing. Last I stepped on a scale I was 207 at 6’5”. frickin fatasses.

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I'll bet you've got skinny wrists like a woman.

2” talker and 46 pounds heavier today. Everybody’s fat now. The weight back then was very healthy.

The depression wasn’t the reason. The vast majority of people didn’t miss a meal. A large percentage of people lived on farms and supplied their own food.

The main reason was…the lack of refrigeration and…grocery stores. It was very difficult to obtain and keep fresh food back then. People didn’t have a pantry and refrigerator full of food.

Most of the common perception of the Depression is a myth. It’s a great story designed to make FDR a folk here, even though nothing he implemented helped.

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Last I stepped on a scale I was 207 at 6’5”. frickin fatasses.

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6’ 2” at 170 pounds for me in my prime. I’m 6’ 1” 178 now, 40 years later.

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90+ percent were malnourished during childhood.

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I posted the other day how the lack of nutritional information was an issue in the early 20th century and later life is when it really showed.

My grandmother died in 2007 at age 92 due to complete skeletal collapse. Every bone in her body fractured in a cascade like dominoes falling. The result of a lack of calcium in her early life.

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Lol. Most of the TD posters that are trying to lose weight talk about how they are 5'10" and would be "skeletons" if they dipped below 190 pounds. This country's conception of healthy weight is f'd up beyond belief.

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Look at the women all the white guys on here who still pretend to like rap music try to convince us are hot. Fat broads with garbage asses the size of Buicks.

Comparing the height and weight of a military inductee (~18yo in prime physical condition) with the current “average American male”
Apples to oranges

Genetics are an interesting thing. I was at the WW1 museum in KC this summer and can verify those uniforms on display there are tiny. They look like uniforms for pre-teens of today. Toy soldier-like.

Years back I was talking with a professor at Iowa State. ISU is the Ag school that does a lot of research in livestock genetics, breeding, etc. Interesting to hear him say that the settling of this country was like a giant genetics experiment. Think about it, to get on a boat and travel to a new land to settle it took a risk taking mentality. Also, to hack and build a life out of the wilderness took a strong person. The weak died, the strong survived. Strong genes prevailed.

About 25 years ago I worked with a California transplant. She commented that the Midwest is a land of giants. People here are just bigger than people in California. Makes sense, a century plus of farm boys predominantly of Northern European descent that settled the Midwest. Big boys that were raised on meat and potatoes that spent their lives getting farm strong.

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which sort of flies in the face of the entire organic food movement as it shows access to food with longer shelf lives may be more beneficial for people as a whole vs trying to revert to more perishable, less preserved, as the food was back then

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No it doesn’t