Recently, I read on a forum about these young Korean kids who are given some type of small green type pill by their mothers to help them grow taller. It is interesting that there is such stuff being sold for at least the last 30 years which supposedly would help young Asian kids grow taller.

Maybe the competitive nature of these East Asian cultures makes mothers try all sorts of rather bizarre things to help give their children any type of edge in life.

In the last two years of research, I personally have found at least 2 other different compounds which have been a part of Traditional Korean Medicine who has been believed to work in helping kids grow taller. Not only that, a group of Korean scientists filed a patent on a type of Ultrasonic-LED Combo type device which was supposed to stimulate the epiphyseal plates. It seems that South Korea, which has taken much of the older medical knowledge from Traditional Chinese Medicine, might have figured out a few natural ways to help its people end up slightly taller.

All this talk about Eastern Mysticism and the Esoteric made me wonder whether the Oriental Superpower Plant known as the Ginseng might have any type of chondrogenic or cartilage enhancing properties. After taking some time to look over PubMed, there were at least a couple of studies which validates this idea.

• Ginsenosides from Korean red ginseng inhibit matrix metalloproteinase-13 expression in articular chondrocytes and prevent cartilage degradation.
• Anti-apoptotic Activity of Ginsenoside Rb₁ in Hydrogen Peroxide-treated Chondrocytes: Stabilization of Mitochondria and the Inhibition of Caspase-3
• Effect of Ginseng Saponin on Human Chondrocyte.
• Ginsenoside Rb1 prevents interleukin-1 beta induced inflammation and apoptosis in human articular chondrocytes

The active ingredient in all of the varieties of Ginseng, is this compound known as ginsenosides, which is in a category of compounds known as the saponin ,or more specifically the triterpenoid saponins. (For more information on Ginsenosides, refer here.) By last count, there is over 150 different kinds of Ginsenosides. From thousands of years of trial and error, humans found that they can orally consume the Ginseng and get the active ingredient inside the Ginseng to work. The Ginsenosides work in the stomach through acid hydrolysis and in the gastrointestinal tract by the reaction bacterial hydrolysis.

It seems that at least three of the over 150 different kinds of ginsenosides have some type of cartilage enhancing ability. I am quite sure that in the last century, multiple Asian researchers have validated the idea that whatever is in ginseng have anti-inflammatory effects. Inflammation is really the start of almost all types of cartilage degradation. If Inflammation is prevented, then the chances of the onset of osteoarthritis is going to be severely reduced.

In the first study, 11 different types of ginseng saponins were used. There were 2 which had some really powerful effects, ginsenosides F4 and Rg3. It is F4 which is really interesting. With increased dosage/concentration of the F4, the inhibition of the MMP-13, which is a collegenase, was increased, almost linearly in fashion. at 50 microMolars, the inhibition of not just the MMP-13, but also the p38 MAPK Pathway was also inhibited.

In the third study, it was found that the saponin was able to cause the number of chondrocytes in deficient mediums to proliferate and have the precursor stem cells to differentiate into chondrocytes{I believe that it was stating that it encourages differentiation of chondrocytes as in chondrocytes into hypertrophic chondrocytes not differentiation of stems into chondrocytes-Tyler}.

This is really interesting because for the longest time, many “grow taller pills” that were sold in places in South Korea (and maybe also China, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) did have extracts of at least a little bit of ginseng in them. Is it really that far fetched for people to believe that the mystical ginseng plant would have some “special” ingredient that would also make them taller?

In the article “South Korea Stretches Standards for Success” published back in Dec. of 2009 in the New York Times, there was a really popular clinic called Hamsoa, which supposedly had already 50 clinics around South Korea, and they gave kids a special type of tonic which was supposed to be taken twice a day. Inside that tonic, was deer antler, ginseng, and other chemical compounds at a much lower concentration. Notice that deer antler and ginseng were mentioned.

It might be possible to use the ginseng to stimulate the activity in the growth plates of young kids, as well as even use the deer antler, but I am not sure how pronounced the stimulation would be. What can be well substantiated is that ginseng seems to help prevent cartilage degeneration and regular chondrocyte apoptosis.

My Personal Analysis On Tyler’s Claims On His Finger Bones Lengthening

So Tyler has asked me to do an exact measurements on the length of his fingers for about a month now. I finally got the time to stop by the local FedEx and asked them to print a blown up copy of all the X-rays that he has shown in previous posts. I chose the option of 24″ x 36″ and printed out all 5 of the pictures, all black and white. I took the prints home, cut out the edges, and checked the length unit standards at the bottom. When I looked at the centimeter scale, which is very much like a map legend, of the X-rays for the left and right hand, they matched EXACTLY. That means that making conclusive conclusions is much easier. I don’t need to multiply by some factor like 1.15 to make the lengths of one of the X-rays to match up to the other X-Ray to work out.

How I prepared the analysis

So I folded the blown up 24″x36″ picture of the X-ray of the right hand on the axis which is parallel to the right index finger. I placed the finger bones right next to each other.

I then used a US Based measuring tape and started to check the length of the bones at the exact center.

Here is what I did find

Based on at least have a dozen extremely, almost anally, specific measurements done on the center of the proximal part of the index finger for both left and right, here is what I found…

On the right index finger, in the proximal finger bone, it is only slightly longer than the left one. How small do I mean by “slightly”? First, the 24″x36″ blown up picture has the length scale at the bottom. Comparing the inches on my measuring tape to the scale, it seems that…

1 cm of the blown up is exactly = what is almost exactly in the middle between 7/8th and 15/16th of the inches of my measuring tape (aka 29/32th) —-> 1 cm = 29/32 inch

Length of the right index finger (measured from proximal end point to end point) – 3 and 9/16th of an inch

Length of the left index finger (measured from proximal end point to end point) – between 3 and 9/16th and 3 and 19/32th of an inch

Sometimes (maybe half of the time) the measurements of the left and right hand index fingers are exactly the same, but the other half of the time, the left index finger is slightly longer, but by maybe just 1/32th of an inch on my measurement tape.

Doing a little bit of converting of the units (and then canceling out the inches terms), we get…

 (1 cm)/(29/32 inch) X (1/32 inch) = 1/29 cm = .34 mm or a little over 1/3rd of a mm

The Result

After half an hour of measuring the same two parts over and over again, being a little too anal over the length, The conclusion is that the proximal bone in the right index finger is around 1/3rd mm longer than the one on the left.

Note: About half of the time I did the measurement, it does seem like that the length measurements for the left and right index fingers were exactly the same. The other half of the time, the right one was just slightly longer than the left one (usually just 1/32rd of an inch of the tape I had). At no measurement did I ever find that the left one was slightly longer than the right index finger, at least for the middle bone part.

What else did I find?

It seems that the most significant difference in length is at the tip of the fingers, on the distal end. The very small distal bone at the tip of the right index finger always seems to be slightly longer than the left one.

• The length of the distal end of the right index finger = 1 and 1/2 inches
• The length of the distal end of the left index finger = 1 and 15/32th inches

The suggest that there is a difference in the tips of the index fingers, by around 1/3rd of a mm.

Further Analysis

At this point, the results show only that 50% of the time when I would do a measurement, it seems that the most proximal phalanges of the right index finger is only about 1/3rd a mm longer than the left one. Based on those results, I would say that the difference can not be used as evidence that the bones in Tyler’s index fingers actually increased in length.

I did not take any statistics & probability courses back in university so I would not be able to do any type of statistical analysis. However, I can put things into perspective.

On average, the length of that specific bone is around 3 and 9/16th inches at the middle, measured from tip to tip. That converts to 3.5625 inches X ( (1 cm)/(29/32 inch)) = (3.5625*0.90625) = 3.2285 cm

That is the length of each of these bones. Divide the 1/3rd of a mm by 3.2285 cm and we find that the difference in length between the two bones being of opposite hands is just at 1% difference. If my measurements are right, then the right finger at least at the proximal one, is maybe 1% longer than the one on the left.

I might be stepping out of line with this post but a recent video I saw on Youtube made me wonder whether a certain tribe or ethnic group’s diet and eating habits might have a much larger influence to the height of a certain ethnicity.

I refer to the trip Gordon Ramsey takes to Vietnam in one of his Great Escape episodes. In the last month, I have started to enjoy many cooking channels, and Gordon is a very colorful, interesting character to follow. I don’t have a TV so I don’t know what is really popular on TV these days. It seems that this series of food traveling show has been around since 2010, and only now have I heard of it.

What really struck me was that in the episode where Gordon visits the country of Vietnam, two different people both talk about the lack of calcium in their diet. First, it was Mrs. Vi Ching and 2nd was the guy who Gordon was eating snake hearts with.

It is interesting that this Mrs. Vi Ching, who supposedly owns 4 of the most famous and well touted restaurants in all of Ho Chi Minh City and goes shopping twice a day for freshness made the offhanded comment that “We have no dairy, so we eat the bone for calcium”. Then when Gordon is out with a couple of the vietnamese men, the restaurant chef would fry up the backbone of the snake they ordered which was made into at least 4-5 different dishes. It was supposed to give them more calcium.

Refer to the video below…

So it seems that for the people in Vietnam who really focus on the food, they have a unique concern with Calcium and getting enough of it. Do they somehow realize that their diet intrinsically lacks the calcium (as well as the Vitamin D, K2, Iron, Amino Acids) that is needed to grow “normal”? Or maybe at least by American standards

In my personal life and my history of going to the various Vietnamese Restaurants, I do sort of see the connection. The Vietnamese do eat a lot of strange animals and delicacies, like frogs and snakes, which had a lot of lean, dark, and flavorful meat. The Vietnamese really care about Flavor and Texture, since the 2nd guy also made the comment that the Vietnamese prefer to eat food that has a little bit of chew to them. They focus on taste, but not utility and function. They eat what tastes good, but forget to eat what might be actually good for them and their bodies. They don’t seem to have that critical factor of dairy. Dairy is missing in their diet.

They might be eating cow and beef, but those are used sparingly. They eat shrimp, but there is little excess meat in their diet. The Vietnamese seem to traditionally like to eat out a lot, at the local Hole In the Wall, which are very cheap. That means that the food might not have the neccesary composition (vitamins & minerals) to give them to grow to their maximum potential. I mean, how nutritious can a Flying Bat or Snake be in terms of real nutrition?

So then, why is it that the Vietnamese are not consuming much dairy products? 

I don’t know. Maybe the forests of Vietnams have not been cleared out to make room for cows to graze in, unlike say the USA or Canada, which has a lot of available land. I don’t know what is the average native vietnamese person’s diet, and how much milk they were drinking when they were children who were still growing.

So some might ask me, does that mean that eating a lot of dairy like milk and cheese with higher than average calcium levels would make themselves taller? My previous research into this suggested that there is a positive correlation but the correlation is very weak. Even the 1-2 studies which support that positive correlation didn’t explicitly state out right that there was a positive correlation, but implied it.

Of course, I could , playing my own Devil’s Advocate, show that the Mongolians, who have no source of seafood, vegetables, or fruits, and live off of a diet of just meat (mainly sheep and goat) and dozens of derivatives of dairy products don’t seem to be shooting up like redwoods. I don’t hear about too many 7 foot tall Mongolians that are trying to get into the NBA.

Most people who analyze the factors which make up an individual’s height says that genetics has around a 60-80% effect on a person’s height. Traditionally, the idea proposed by geneticists is that if you are born to short parents or into what has been considered a short “ethnicity”, then there is nothing you can do about it especially in terms with changing one’s diet.

However, there has been multiple times in the last half decade where I have seen cultural trends which suggest that maybe diet and environment may play a much bigger role than believed.

I remember one time in a shopping center and two super tall females walked by me. Both of them were carrying 1 gallons of milk in each of their hands. When I commented them on their purchases of so much milk, one of the girls commented that where she is from, their diet strongly emphasizes dairy problems. I would found out after asking where she was from that she and the other girl were from an unknown city in Germany. Of course, I know from experience that not all full blooded German ethnic girls are above average in height or consume a lot of milk. It might have been just one unique case.

What I can’t write off is this phenomena seen in Denmark, the Netherlands and other Northern European nations where the standard of living is so good. We know from observation that it seems that “Asian” people are stereotupically shorter than say the “Average White American”. However, many sociologists point out that the difference in height is due to them being usually 1st generational immigrants. When these immigrants have children in their new country, with a better diet and healthcare system, the 2nd generational kids turn out to be much taller than them.

That is the phenomena seen in the Netherlands and Denmark, when babies are born of immigrant parents from say Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, etc end up MUCH taller than what was expected of them by their parents, who might be a little over 5 feet tall. The change in stature by just 1 single generation is staggering! . I don’t disagree that compared to the 100% in blood Ethnic Dutch, the Turkish Immigrants or say a Filipino immigrant might be much shorter on average. What happens almost always is that the immigrant’s kids turn out to be much taller. The height difference is reduced dramatically.

Sure, there is probably not going to be a way to test this out, with a set of identical twins, one raised in native Turkey or Iran, and the other twin living in Amsterdam, thus a control and the subject. However, I believe that most sociologist would agree with me that it SEEMS LIKE that if you grow up in a different country, your expected adult height changes, often by a lot, and even by a few standard deviations.

That would mean that one’s environment and most definitely the local food has a major influence on the kids’s development.

In fact, there is a phenomena seen in the East Asian community where immigrants who came to the Western countries (USA, Canada, Australia) later in life, say in their 20s almost could not get fat or overweight even if they wanted to and ate a lot, but their 2nd generation Asian Canadian (or Asian American) counterpart found themselves struggling with their weight their whole adult lives. At some point in the phase where the teenager turns into an adult, the body’s metabolism changes and the two groups of people who have the same ethnicity starts to diverge in their body shape, both in height and weight.

It seems like the diet that one eats when one is very young and in development dictates one’s adult metabolism level. I suspect that it has to do with the raising of the IGF-1 level in one’s system, and how well one’s body can produce and use insulin.

On average, I would say that above average in height adults in the USA are more likely to be overweight than average in height people and short people. That means that height and weight are positively correlated, pushing one’s BMI steadily higher over time, (since the factor of height is squared and divided over in the BMI Calculation)

What does this all mean?

It seems that the old stereotype of Asians being short may be explained much more by their traditional diet than previously believed. Based on this old World Health Organization report (Click Here for the PDF), it was shown that the growth pattern was almost exactly the same for all tribes and ethnic groups from around the world. That would suggest that if all ethnic tribes were places in the same environment with the same level of healthcare and had the same diet and eating habits, on average, they would have all the same adult height, accounting for the initial length and weight of the person when they were first born. (Multiple studies showed that people who are born big, grow to be bigger, since they start out initially with much more mass, aka many more chondrocytes which had condensated in their embryological development.)

Maybe the Vietnamese are shorter than average because of the lack of dairy products in their diet. I do believe that diet plays a much bigger role than I had thought a year ago. I did show once that eating the shells from a lot of Shellfish, or Shrimp, or Crayfish (Mini Lobsters), or any type of sea life based creature with a keratin/nail like exoskeleton might help in one’s growth pattern. It turns out that Glucosamine Sulphate, which was one of the biggest discoveries and posts on this website (Refer to that viral post here), is derived from the shells of shrimp and shellfish. Yes, technically Glucosamine Sulphate is a compound that is endogenously produced in the human body, but consuming it helps with making many joints in the body increase in thickness and volume, if ever so slightly.

If I was to say one thing about this point, it is that maybe a large factor for the differences in height in the various “races” and ethnic groups is due to their food choices, particularly the lack of dairy products when they were young.

Update 17 – Cartilage Degeneration Disorders – September 1st, 2014

First Issue

In the last month or so I have found out that certain close friends and family members, who are still extremely young, have already started to suffer from severe articular cartilage degeneration. It seems that the phenomena of cartilage degeneration is a much, MUCH more prevalent medical condition than I would have thought.

That is why I am going to put much more focus, effort, and energy on also figuring out how to possibly repair articular cartilage damage than before. I am not saying that I am going to figure out the next best thing to treat osteo-arthritis or tissue inflammation but I understand that what I have been researching non-stop for the last 2 year can be very helpful in my own personal life, and to the people around me who I care about.

This desire to help people become taller and gain height even after skeletal maturity will always be there, with a focus on the scientific research. I also now understand that what I have uncovered can also be used to treat much more severe medical conditions.

If I have the chance to help someone out with a medical condition with the deep insight that I gained from thousands of hours of reading, then I would do that.

Second Issue

Most of the people who have regularly visited the website might have noticed that over time, it has slowly changed in form, and become more technical. Some of it might get harder to understand and read. That is something that I knew would happen. The level of medical understanding needs to improve over time (as well as the quality of writing).

With a much more sophisticated understanding of the overall human body, I would finally be able to understand the research that the world’s top experts are working on. If I can, I want to synthesize the results that they have found to discover something completely new.

A recent search on Google lead me to this question posed in the USMLE Step 1 Exam and it showed me that there is still much more I need to learn and understand before I can ever make a clear and logical argument on our theories before any professional orthopedic specialist.

It seems that my understanding of at least the process of Mesenchymal Stem Cell Condensation during embryogenesis to form the Chondrocytes is still lacking on how the protein signal pathways work.

I asked the question later whether the chemical compound Dibutyryl cAMP can be used as a way to get the MSCs in our own blood marrow to go directly into the chondrogenic lineage like they seem to do during the embryogenic process. It would turn out that I was wrong about this issue. Dibutyryl cAMP is a very unique compound which is only expressed/found in chondrocytes. It seems to be a type of chemical indicator used by researchers to check to make sure that what a cell differentiated into is indeed actually chondrocytes.