Something that I have noticed in my own life in meeting different types of people their own unique genetic predisposition and hereditary traits is that having certain types of genetic tendencies leading to allegies or intolerance towards some foods may have some type of correlation to stunted growth.

I would like to propose the theory in this post that people who have the food allergy of being lactose intolerant have at some level stunted growth and end up shorter than a person who can ingest lactose rather easily.

For me personally, I have a small level of lactose intolerance. I know that when I was younger I had digestive problems whenever I consumed large amounts of milk or milk derivative products. I would learn later that two people who were around my age being females seemed to have been allergic to milk and lactose as well from their fathers’ genetic makeup. They ended up being either average in height or shorter than average.

So the common layperson can make the easy correlation with

• Being Lactose Intolerant
• The main type of sugar found in milk of cows is lactose
• Milk has besides the lactose sugar, Calcium and Vitamin D
• If a child can not ingest milk because the sugar inside cow milk causes them problems, they would avoid milk and chess – This means that they probably are not getting as much Calcium and Vitamin D into their diet as another person who is not suffeirng lactose intolerance would.

In a very old post “The Real Correlation Between Milk, Calcium, Bone Growth, And Height” I did state that the correlation between increased milk consumption and increased growth and final height is actually very weak. However that does not mean that they are not completely uncorrelated. I would write in a recent post “Drinking Milk And Getting Calcium Will Only Increase Growth Rate And Height Substantially In Pre-Pubescent Girls, A Personal Theory” a personal theory that for girls who have not reached puberty yet, the affect from increased consumption would have result in a reasonable increase in their final height.

The truth is that most studies done on children who are already in puberty and the teenage years show that increased calcium intake from taking supplements lead to only increased bone mineral density, but no increased bone longitudinal growth. However there are a couple of studies from the early 20th century when most nations still had a large percentage of their people not getting the necessary amount of nutrient that drinking milk did help increase the growth rate, at least for very young kids.

If the case is that milk can help very young kids grow taller, then the reverse logic of having an inability to ingest milk would result in decreased growth rates when the child is still very young leading to an eventual shorter final height.

For people with lactose intolerance, the consumption of milk with the sugar lactose would lead to stomach pains, stomach muscle cramps, development of gases, and flatulence. Since the associated pain and flatulence would result, the kid suffering from lactose intolerance would try to avoid drinking milk, eating cheese, or trying out dairy ice cream throughout their development. The decrease in Vitamin D consumption means that the ossification process in the growth plates will not be as fast in building the bones as when there is milk consumption leading to increased Vitamin D levels in the blood.