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[ReadRothbard]

I slept around 6 hrs a night throughout my teens, and also had a vitamin d deficiency. If I nipped those in the but back then, I would have been 6' like the good doctor said. Don't make the same mistake LWM. Your spinal growth plates might still be open. If they are, than get your blood work done to see if you have any vitamin deficiencies. Make sure you get 8 hrs sleep a night, drink 3 huge glasses of milk a day, and get on that HGH immediately.

Milk + sleep = max potential height. Wish I knew this as a kid.

Ugh, no. That's not how it works. You might have lost 1/10 of an inch through not "nipping those in the butt". Unless you are severely malnourished, that didn't have an effect.

[Overdozer]

Ugh, no. That's not how it works. You might have lost 1/10 of an inch through not "nipping those in the butt". Unless you are severely malnourished, that didn't have an effect.

You can't say that. Nutrition is known to have a significant influence on human height. Secular trend happens not when one generation suddenly jumps from being 'severely malnourished' to a high quality, good diet. It happens when the quality of nutrition gradually increases per generation and it's a known fact.

[Melan_sprint]

You can't say that. Nutrition is known to have a significant influence on human height. Secular trend happens not when one generation suddenly jumps from being 'severely malnourished' to a high quality, good diet. It happens when the quality of nutrition gradually increases per generation and it's a known fact.

no women are getting together with taller and taller men, thats why they are getting taller each year. including the womenz are taller now. Not because of food or malnurishment. 2+2=4

[NewHeights]

no women are getting together with taller and taller men, thats why they are getting taller each year. including the womenz are taller now. Not because of food or malnurishment. 2+2=4

Partially true about mate selection, but the effects of nutrition have a much greater role in the increase on human height over time. As RothBard mentioned however, the majority of this height increase from nutrition is due to the general population of people no longer being nutritionally deficient.

The extra few CM's of height however can come from "superior" nutrition, most of which can be captured simply from drinking milk. There is a reason that every children's multi vitamin advertises vitamin D3 and calcium as ingredients. Mega-dosing D3 was actually scientifically proven to increase height in children. So, say a kid has the genetic potential to be 180 CM; if he has a 19th century diet he will hit 173 CM, if he has a standard modern diet without any vitamin deficiencies, he may hit 177 CM, but If he drinks milk like a champ and sleeps like a baby, he may hit 180 CM.

This is painful for me to write because it brings back bad memories of my vitamin D deficiency.

[Uppland]

You can't say that. Nutrition is known to have a significant influence on human height. Secular trend happens not when one generation suddenly jumps from being 'severely malnourished' to a high quality, good diet. It happens when the quality of nutrition gradually increases per generation and it's a known fact.

This guy is right, unless you are severly malnourished your height wouldn't have changed much. Your body size was already determined before you were born, accept it.

[Alittletooshort]

This guy is right, unless you are severly malnourished your height wouldn't have changed much. Your body size was already determined before you were born, accept it.

Decreased height due to malnourishment is something that usually doesn´t occur in more developed countries. It´s our genes that determine our height, I know so many people who are significally taller than you would expect when you see their parents, on the other hand there are people like us who end up shorter than expected. They werent nourished better or worse than me or others, they simply have a different gene activated that lets their bodies grow taller.

[Uppland]

Yes height is a commplicated process that isn't very well understood, it includes more than 20 different genes that work together in complicated ways. The only thing that has been proven to influence your adolescent growth, as far as I know, is various forms of steroids.

[mini_me]

I think you guys are mostly right… not getting all your nutrition or a full 8 hours sleep is not likely going to affect the height of 1 person. My doctor had told me that most bodies have a way of compensating for deficiencies while they are growing from children to adulthood unless there are unusual or extreme circumstances. Unfortunately, mine was a little extreme because I went on a "soda diet" (drinking soda to feel full & eating as little solid foods to lose weight) for about 6 years in my adolescence and I got really really skinny. Worse, I slept only 4 hours a day by taking 2 hour naps as my way getting more study time for school. My body became accustomed to waking up automatically after 2 hours for many years even after I graduated college. Even with all that, I'm only going to say I might have lost 1-3 inches of growth since I stopped growing when I was on my soda diet with my sleep deprivation habits... or maybe I was destined to be shorter than my father and all my male relatives… who knows.

That being said, I think the foods you eat can affect people's growth over generations and it's not about nutrition either.
Over many generations, smaller Asians tend to eat far less calories and less red meat than their larger western counterparts with more vegetable & seafoods and even insects in their diet. Red meat was definitely not common even for the wealthy. I definitely think that it affected their evolutionary heights and evolution affects physical appearance down to your genes.

From my observations, westernized Asians eating a lot more American fast foods over a few generations are growing faster than those who live mostly on traditional diets because all my relatives who eat traditionally are smaller (but probably healthier) than those whose families have become westernized eating steak and burgers. It's quite noticeable at family gatherings when we have seating arrangements with tables serving traditional asian buffet and western buffet. Those sitting at tables eating noodles/rice/tofu with assorted chopped meat/seafood and using chopsticks are noticeably smaller than those accustomed to eating steak, burgers and potatoes/fries using forks and knives. It's almost comedic looking. I'm not talking about 1 generation but over several generations of accustomed food habits.

[Overdozer]

This guy is right, unless you are severly malnourished your height wouldn't have changed much. Your body size was already determined before you were born, accept it.

Incorrect. You don't need to be 'severly malnourished' to lose some of your 'detemined height'.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X14000665

The dramatic increase of height in Europe starting during the late 19th century is closely linked with the beneficial effect of the industrial revolution. Our comparisons show that this effect is manifested in generally higher standards of living, better healthcare, lower children's mortality, lower fertility rates, higher levels of urbanization, higher social equality and access to superior nutrition containing high-quality animal proteins. In the past, some of these factors may have been more important for a healthy physical growth than they are today and some of them are important only in certain regions, but in general, the most important exogenous factor that impacts height of contemporary European nations is nutrition. More concretely, it is the ratio between proteins of the highest quality (mainly from milk, pork meat and fish) and the lowest quality (i.e. plant proteins in general, but particularly wheat proteins). Besides that, we discovered a similarly strong connection between male height and the frequency of certain genetic lineages (Y haplogroups), which suggests that with the gradual increase of living standards, genetic factors will increasingly be getting to the foreground. Even today, many wealthy nations of West European descent are ca. 3 cm smaller than much poorer countries of the former Eastern block with the same nutritional statistics. Another evidence for this genetic hypothesis recently appeared in the study of Turchin et al. (2012), who found systematically higher presence of alleles associated with increased height in US whites of North European ancestry than in Spaniards.

Remarkably, the quality of nutrition in the wealthiest countries shows signs of a marked deterioration, as indicated by the decreasing values of the “protein index”. This can illuminate the recent deceleration/cessation of the positive height trend in countries like USA, Norway, Denmark or Germany, which was routinely explained as the exhaustion of the genetic potential. In our opinion, this assumption is still premature and with the new improvement of nutritional standards, some increase still can be expected.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/4/1088.2.full

In summary, in our prospective study, we observed a height gain in the children who consumed a high amount of cow milk. Milk is regarded as the best nutritional support for neonatal growth and development. In pubertal children, cow milk may also be an important nutrient for growth and for achieving optimal bone mass to prevent osteoporosis in later life. Finally, height gain in children may depend not only on the calcium in cow milk but also on some of its bioactive components.