NEW YORK: If you want to see a tall population of men, go to the Netherlands. Tall women? Latvia.

And in the United States, which lags behind dozens of other countries in height, the average for adults stopped increasing about 20 years ago.

That’s the word from researchers who analyzed a century’s worth of height data from 200 countries. Results were released yesterday in the journal eLife.

National height averages are useful as an indicator of nutrition, health care, environment and general health that people have experienced from the womb through adolescence, said Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, who led the research. Genes also influence height.

The researchers calculated average height for 18 year olds, roughly the age when people stop growing. They drew on more than 1,400 studies that covered more than 18.6 million adults who reached that age between 1914 and 2014.

Experts said the results generally agree with what others have reported before.

The tallest men in the new analysis were Dutch, with an average height of about 6 feet (182.5 centimeters). The next nine tallest countries in order for men were Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Iceland and the Czech Republic.