Huh?
Article talks about how men and women showed greater signs of malnourishment in the north than southern populations, then claim northern men were taller than southern because they had more food?
If that were true, then why did northern men show greater signs of malnutrition than the shorter Southern males?
What would make more sense is due to food shortages, those with higher levels of sexual dimorphism reproduced more.
Small women because they needed less resources, and larger males because they could claim more resources.
So even though people in the North werent getting enough resources, they were taller.
And that's not even getting into all the other reasons that tall men and short women were selected for. It could have just been superficial preference over a couple of centuries.
There's a ridiculous amount of factors that go into a single person's height, talking about a population's height over centuries is waaaaaay more complicated and has even more factors adding up over that time