Question for tall people

I'm not sure where you read or heard that poor nutrition can stunt your growth, maybe it does if you suffer from starvation, but it is not true. I am 5'9". And I ate a steady diet of fast food throughout my growing years. My mom is 5'9" and my dad is 6'4". Genetics.

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Wow. 4'10??

How old is she? Has she hit puberty?

First borns tend to be taller. (Nutrition stores in mamma helps.)

Nutrition definitely plays a part in height. For example, after WWII Japan started eating more protein from fish and their population grew as a whole by about 3 inches.

Just look at immigrant families. The parents who came here from ______ country are usually a few inches shorter than their children who grew up here. (Excluding the Nordic countries and those damn Danes. )

I know a family where the eldest is the shortest, and the youngest is the tallest. I don't think it had anything to do with what they ate somehow.

I'm 5'9", which is tall-ish for a female, I suppose. As a kid/teen, my diet consisted mostly of meat, simple carbs (pasta/rice/bread), fast food, junk food, candy galore, and fruits. I've always had a tendency to skip breakfast and eat a medium-sized lunch, colossal-sized dinner, and enough sweets to put a diabetic in a coma.

My mom is 5'1" and my dad was 5'5". I have 5 siblings and I'm the tallest of all of them--my second-oldest brother comes close at 5'7". Apparently I get my height from my great-grandfather as my other grandparents were super short.

SierraFatToSkinny wrote: »

First borns tend to be taller. (Nutrition stores in mamma helps.)

Nutrition definitely plays a part in height. For example, after WWII Japan started eating more protein from fish and their population grew as a whole by about 3 inches.

Just look at immigrant families. The parents who came here from ______ country are usually a few inches shorter than their children who grew up here. (Excluding the Nordic countries and those damn Danes. )

You are so right about the Danes. My husband's maternal family is Danish and he's 6'4", and his mom and sister are 5'11" or so.

Ya'll would be surprised what's really influenced by nutrition and environment.

I have a good friend who is a genetist and it's quite encouraging.

For example, intelligence. Intelligence! Not really genetic. It's almost exclusively the based on what's going on in utero and the first couple years (if not the first couple months) of life.

Oxygen is insanely important. Vitamin D is insanely important.

For example, people born during summer months are generally taller than those born in winter months. People born in fall tend to suffer more from brain disorders. Those born in the winter tend to have higher risk of heart issues.

All of this is chalked up to the amount of sun the mother receives during pregnancy.

There's loads of very interesting statistics out there ready to be googled.

In a Western country where protein is readily available and food scarcity simply isn't an issue for folks in ordinary circumstances, there's no reason to think you can alter your growth by eating any differently than you do now.

I'm a hair taller than my father -- well, a hair taller than he was; now that he's well into his 80s he's shrunk a bit -- and I ate nothing special as a kid. In fact I was a very picky eater. There were lots of foods I could hardly even gag down. In elementary school when they did the sort of height and weight check that passed for screening in those days, they'd always note me as being underweight. (Not a problem these days!)

As others have noted, there are factors other than genetics that might affect your height, but you can't do anything about any of them now.

SierraFatToSkinny wrote: »

Ya'll would be surprised what's really influenced by nutrition and environment.


Oxygen is insanely important. Vitamin D is insanely important.

For example, people born during summer months are generally taller than those born in winter months. .

I find this a little hard to believe. The variations between countries are more significant than the variations in season.

I am from Norway, and like the rest of the Scandinavian countries, it is dark and cold for a large part of the year. And people living here are among the tallest in the world.

I'm 5'9 and spent my teenage years drinking 8 cokes and day and eating chocolate, chips and iced buns. That was basically all I ate. I was skinny (and anemic). So I'm going with genetics over nutrition.

Jtalaskamom wrote: »

I'm not sure where you read or heard that poor nutrition can stunt your growth, maybe it does if you suffer from starvation, but it is not true.

How about from pediatric endocrinologists? "Your growth-hormone deficient child has to eat more, or GH therapy won't work. We're not going to treat them until you put some weight on them." Which is entirely backward in most cases; replacing the missing hormone will make the child hungry, and they'll eat like crazy because they're growing.

noowaseem13579 wrote: »

I am 5'9

My mom is 5'4" and my dad is 5'11"

My sister in her growing years refused to consume many food groups (no meat, fish, vegetables, whole grains, vegetables or fruit) and basically grew up on refined flour products, chips, and white rice. She is 4'10"

It's more likely that your sister had growth hormone deficiency or a genetic syndrome, than that her poor diet caused her not to grow. The expected height for your parents' female offspring would be 5'5", plus or minus 2". Your going above that to 5'9" isn't out of the ordinary, but your sister's height is way below the expected range.

Mid-parental height calculator

Everyone... nutrition definitely plays a part.

You're free to google several of the items I've mentioned if you don't believe me.

Also, "height" isn't a single gene. There's a lot that goes into determining if a person is tall or short. We're talking femurs, tibias, spine... other stuff. I'm not a doctor, I just play one on the Internet.

There's "genetic potential" and then, yes, environment comes into play.

Who your parents are, what age they are when they conceived, the frequency of children (mom's nutrient stores), the month they conceived, if it was natural or in-vitro, if mom was short (smaller women tend to have a higher likelihood of premature birth), what mom ate while pregnant, if baby was breastfed, and yes... what the child ate while growing. All of that goes into height.

Genes are often influenced by your environment.

Nutrition 100% plays a part in helping to set a child's height.

... I'm now going to unsubscribe from this thread as the anecdotal evidence is driving me a tad bit nutty.