i don’t think i’m exaggerating when i say that the average height for women in the US would increase by at least an inch if teen girls were allowed to eat as much as teen boys are
Not to get on my annoying public health/heightism shit, but this is actually kinda not what evidence is telling us. The population of US women is actually getting a little shorter, and it's not because of eating disorders or malnutrition, at least not the way you might think. If you look at the bell curves for weight of kids and teens, overweight is more prevalent than underweight. Most people are getting plenty of food, if not too much, including kids who are classified statistically as girls.
Increased availability of high fat, high sugar foods is causing the average age of menarche to decrease, aka, precocious puberty. It's gone from about 14 to 12 over the last century. This is a whole 'nother can of worms (precocious puberty is associated with a lot of negative outcomes, for various reasons), but in regards to height, it does trigger the bones to be like "ok, we're pretty much done growing". The big puberty growth spurt for people with periods tends to happen before the initiation of periods. For plenty of kids these days, that's around 10 or 11. There's also the fact that the US population is becoming less white (yay) and some folks are just a little shorter than people with primarily Western European ancestry. It's not some pathological thing that some people, for various reasons, aren't tall. Being tall isn't the optimal state for humanity. In a Utopia where everyone grows up with perfect nutrition, average female height will probably still be around 5'4"-5'6" for most populations.
