LEON IS GETTING LARGER: You’re Not Getting Much Taller, America. But You Are Getting Bigger.

Meet the average American man. He weighs 198 pounds and stands 5 feet 9 inches tall. He has a 40-inch waist, and his body mass index is 29, at the high end of the “overweight” category.

The picture for the average woman? She is roughly 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighs 171 pounds, with a 39-inch waist. Her B.M.I. is close to 30.

That’s a not at all how Americans used to look. New data show that both men and women gained a whopping 24 pounds on average from 1960 to 2002; through 2016, men gained an additional eight pounds, and women another seven pounds.

I wonder how much of this is influenced by immigration, given that we have a lot of immigrants from Mexico, where people are shorter, and where obesity is actually worse than the United States? The story breaks numbers down into black, white, and hispanic, but doesn’t say anything about changes in relative numbers, or distinguish between immigrants and native born. But they do say this about average height: “The decrease may result from an increasing population of Mexican-American men, whose average height in 2016 was 61.5 inches.”