Nutrition vs Genetics

I took a trip to the Philippines back in 2019, the first trip I would ever take outside of the continent. As is an unspoken rule among many Filipino people, if you travel to the Philippines, you make it worth it by staying at least 2 weeks. Curious 16-year-old me learned a lot in the 1 month my family stayed, and among the immense culture shock I experienced, I noticed one particular reoccurring theme I saw being surrounded by other Filipinos.

Besides the obvious fact that I was a foreigner and could mostly speak only English with broken fragments of Ilonggo (eel-ohng-go), my family's native dialect, scattered throughout, I was more or less the same height as or just a bit taller than everyone else. This was something I wasn't used to in America, as others my age towered well above me. I never considered myself out-of-place, but it always irked me how I, a 5'5" individual, was the shortest guy or the same height as the girls in almost every single social situation.

I wondered if something I did wrong in my youth caused me to fall behind in growing. In reality, it didn't, and it shows through my siblings and I being nearly as tall or taller than our parents. Society has become very obsessed with the idea that being a certain race or ethnicity causes one to have a different genetic make-up than another person, height included. Science has proved constantly that this isn't the case, but rather it's familial genes and nutrition that determine height.