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There are a lot of health advantages to being short and disadvantages that can often make a shorter person concerned about their height. It can be confusing to understand all the benefits when trying to weigh them up against the disadvantages.
In many cases, the health benefits can make life easier to deal with, but in some cases, more difficult to handle. This is why educating yourself on health advantages as a short person is critical. The reason you should learn what these are is that it can help give you some understanding of some of the difficulties that you may not have thought of before.
It can also help with preventing some of the more dangerous risks associated with being short that you may not think of otherwise. So with this in mind, it’s time to learn what the advantages and disadvantages are for when you’re considered shorter than average height.
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Short People Can Have Lower Risk Of Cancer
For a long time now there have been some concerns that there is a link between height and getting cancer. With just how dangerous cancer is there is always a cause for concern. There are outside influences like alcohol, smoking, food, etc that can increase your odds of getting it, but does your height affect the chances of suffering from cancer?
There was a study in 2018 that being taller had an increased risk of getting cancer. With it being for every 4 inches there was an increase of roughly 10%. If this is true then being taller will give you a much higher chance of getting cancer.
While the study is only speculative, it isn’t something that you should instantly be worried about yet. A more likely situation is that the taller person has more cells in their body, and with more cells comes more chance of them turning cancerous.
So this is good news for healthy shorter people who will have fewer cells in their body which could give them a lower risk of cancer. While it won’t fully remove the risk of getting cancer, but if there is a chance that being shorter reduces the risk, then that is certainly a health benefit.
Height Can Affect The Type Of Cancer
In the same study, it was noted that heights were affecting the types of cancer people were getting. Tall people have higher levels of something that’s called IGF-1 which increases the risk of skin cancer. Shorter people will have less of this which will decrease the chance of getting this particular type of cancer.
Tho your environment and the way you live will affect it more such as heavy exposure to the sun, smoking, and heavy alcohol consumption will give you a higher chance of mouth cancer. So just being tall or short won’t mean you will or won’t get cancer and the way you live will have a much heavier impact on if you will get it.
Lower Chance Of Venous Thrombosis
Venous Thrombosis is a horrible thing to have and trying to minimize the ways of getting it is always important. There are a number of factors that can cause you to get venous thrombosis, but the question is, does your height affect your chances?
There are studies that show being taller has an increased risk of getting venous thrombosis since they have what’s called more stasis in their legs. This is something that increases the odds of getting this and certainly could explain the increased risk. Since men are generally taller then women they will have an even higher risk.
So while there are some disadvantages to being short this something that I’d consider an advantage. Since you have a much lower chance of getting venous thrombosis than someone who is taller. But this doesn’t mean you won’t get a form of it and you should still be careful, even if you’re a shorter person.
There are a number of other things that can cause you to get this even if you’re shorter. Things, like sitting down for long periods of time and not moving, will increase the risk of getting some form of venous thrombosis.
Short Person Gets More Bedroom Action
Being a shorter person in the dating market can be difficult if you’re a male since a lot of women do seem to prefer taller guys. What if I were to tell you that being shorter has an advantage in sex life department over your taller male counterparts.
A small study that was done on 531 heterosexual males showed that men who were under 5 foot 9 inches had more sex than men who were taller. Which is good news for the shorter men in the world who are probably very happy to read this bit of news.
While this study was only small it did show this interesting fact that was very interesting when you consider the stigma around being a shorter male. So it’s good that the world is changing its view on shorter people and the dating world.
This study was done on men who had partners and results didn’t show anything on single people, so there isn’t anything on whether being shorter and single increased your sex life.
There are a number of things that can affect how often you’re having sex with things like age and health affecting it. It’s no secret that the younger you are and are healthier the more your sex life will be affected. So just being shorter doesn’t mean you will get more action for being short.
It’s great that being short isn’t considered a downside in the dating world anymore and in some cases like this, it might just even be more useful. So remember to be healthy if you want to increase your odds even further!
Sex Is A Benefit To Your Health
While we all know sex is enjoyable there are a number of other benefits that just make it even better. This is good news for the shorter people out there who have more sex then a taller person.
One of the most obvious advantages of sex is that it’s good for your physical health. In some ways, you can consider it a form of exercise since it gives a lot of the same benefits as increased heart rates. While it won’t be meaning you don’t need to go to the gym anymore, it’s still a great advantage.
There is practically no one on this earth who has never been stressed which is one sure-fire of hurting your body. Thankfully sex is great at reducing stress since it affects the part of your brain where the reward and pleasure system is which will help in reducing stress.
When things like testosterone and estrogen become unbalanced it can lead to heart disease and osteoporosis. One of the best ways to reduce the risk of this is by having sex which will help protect your heart. Having sex two times a week will lower the risk of heart disease by up to 50% in men.
Shorter Men Can Live Longer
If you’ve paid attention to how most of the taller people out there do seem to pass away at a younger age then this won’t come as a surprise. Shorter people do have a tendency to live longer than tall people do due to what scientists call the “longevity gene”
The study that showed this said that people who were 5 foot 2 inches lived the longest. This was followed up with that the taller people got that their lifespan was shortened. So this is some good news for the short people out there and their life expectancy.
With the “longevity gene’ FOXO3 they found some other interesting things that being short has some other advantages. Having a smaller body size were more likely to have things like a lower blood insulin level and like I mentioned above, a lower chance of getting cancer.
15% Of Short People Live Into Their 90’s
The thing that makes this study so important is that it was done on a much larger group than others. It was done with 8000 men which allowed it to link things like height and lifespan that a smaller size you wouldn’t be able to show. Out of the 8000 men, about 1200 did live until they were in their 90s and even some in the 100s.
As with all things like these kinds of studies their factors that will affect your life span. Living a healthier lifestyle will increase your life expectancy and just being short doesn’t mean you will live to you’re 100. But the overall consensus is that short people live longer.
Health Disadvantages When You’re Short
How Short People Are At Greater Risk Of Heart Disease
A lot of this list has been all the positive advantages of being a short person with there being not a lot of downsides in terms of health. That is until you get to the heart and the risks that being short can have on the important organ known as the heart.
This was first reported in 1951 so it’s been going on for a long time with there being a lot of studies trying to prove this. The thing with all these studies is there is no known cause as to why short people had more heart disease than taller people.
The most popular hypothesis is that shorter people have more narrow arteries that might be the main cause of shorter people and heart disease. One thing to note is that there have been no official studies into this hypothesis so it should be taken as such and not considered a fact.
What makes this very interesting is that being short increases the risk of heat-related illness and death by 1.5 times. It doesn’t discriminate between men and woman which is fairly unusual in these situations. They both have an increased chance of having a heart attack by up to 52%.
It’s the lack of an answer that makes this very confusing especially since there have been a number of studies on it. One researcher thinks it has something to do with when a child is born and being smaller. Often parents will overfeed the child in hopes of helping it grow which could lead to excess weight and heart risk.
Poor Lung Function In Short People Linked To Heart Disease
Another study that was done by researches from the Queen Mary University of London got some results showing that the cause of heart disease in short people might be linked to there lungs. This study showed that there was no evidence of the link between just being short and heart disease.
In this study, it showed that the lungs had a larger effect than things like blood pressure, fat percentage, and cholesterol. The results of this study show that when measuring someone’s height that we should also assess the lungs as well to help in preventing the risk of getting a heart disease.
The overall consensus is that, just like any other type of person, being short has both health advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the day, it’s great to be aware of where you could potentially be at risk, but living a healthy lifestyle is where it is at.