A few recent articles that was reported to me has had me go back to the link between increased levels of Iron in a person’s blood and a very noticeable increase in a person’s adult height, compared to a person with iron levels that are closer to average levels. Let me refer the readers to the following links below…

• Increased Height in HFE Hemochromatosis – www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1303066
• Once Weekly Is Superior to Daily Iron Supplementation on Height Gain but Not on Hematological Improvement among Schoolchildren in Thailand1 – http://jn.nutrition.org/content/132/3/418.full

The idea that oral ingestion of such a common, easy to obtain supplement to help one grow taller is shocking, but it does seem, based on the backing of the medical professionals, that taking Iron supplements when a person is still developing has a very noticeable effect on their final adult height.

Originally, the article was brought up by someone from the reddit/r/tall subreddit group and it lead me back to a very short, blurb of a post I wrote last year on the link between Iron and people being taller. Back then, I did absolutely no work or analysis on what is really going on. – (http://www.naturalheightgrowth.com/2014/02/07/increased-height-iron/)

Here is my new, much more detailed analysis on the link.

First, we have to realize that almost any type of vitamin/mineral/nutritional deficiency that one suffers when one is younger, particularly when one is still a baby, infant, or child, has the effect of stunting the growth of the person. While the human body is said to be almost all Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen, there is a small percentage of the human that operates based on the unique characteristics of other elements. Calcium, Pottasium, Phosphorous, Magnesium, Copper, Sulfur, Chlorine, off of the top of my head.

I am not a nutritionist, but I would assume that to get all of the other minerals/elements into our body, we need to be eating a variety of different types of foods, including fish, meat, nuts, fruits, etc. This is to make an effort to get all of the necessary minerals the body needs to grown to its natural maximum height. What I am talking about is the stunting effect of not having enough of some mineral or vitamin.

However, I have not really heard of the ability of a vitamin or mineral, when in excess can actually help the human body become taller. The common idea with nutritionists is that anything can become a poison to the human body, at a high enough concentration. This old idea would suggest that a higher than average level of iron intake into the human body would have an adverse effects on health, thus decreasing the person’s eventual adult height.

That is not what the medical researchers are saying though. When you have the body oversaturated with iron, the child grows up to be taller than if they just took an average amount of the mineral. Of course I am not stupid and suggest that a mother should be feeding her new born iron infused formula to possibly turn the kid into a basketball player, going that extreme.

Let’s take a look at the studies to see what they are actually saying.

The first study is talking about a iron condition known as HFE associated Hemochromatosis. This unique physiological trait that is genetic derived seemes to cause higher than average levels of iron to be adsorbed and retained in the body. It seems that when a person is growing, the growth rate has some type of effect on the level of iron in the person’s body.

When the human body is going through a rate of higher than average growth, like through a growth spurt or puberty, there is not enough iron that is available in the body to maximum the rate of interstitial growth. This means that for most people who don’t have the HFE Hemochromatosis, they did not maximize their rate of growth to maximum height.

In the study, about 175 participants from Switzerland went in for testing. 93% of the participants were found to have a homozygous C282Y mutation. Their iron levels in the blood were tested and were found to have serum ferritin level of more than 300 μg per liter or a transferrin saturation of more than 45%. There was about 120 men and the rest were female. The men’s heights, when averaged out turned out to be a little over 178 cm, which is around 4 cm higher than the average height taken from Swiss Military records. The female subjects’ average height was around 167 cm, or 3.3 cm higher than the average height of females.

To scale the data correctly to a reference/scale, data from a reference population in Ireland was used, which has the highest percentage of people having the C282Y mutation of all European nations. This is to remove the possibility that there is a large percentage of people with Northern European ethnicity in the 175 subject group. The data is statistically relevant, with P<0.001

The researchers suggested that it is possible that the increased levels of iron helped in the growth process in the first 2 decades of a person’s life.

The 2nd study’s main point is that it would make sense for a person to take iron supplements intermittently than on a regular basis, at least to prevent the onset of anemia in developing countries.

The following factors were tested from doing two tests, giving ferrous sulfate daily and weekly (as well as Albendazol to help treat intestinal worms).

The results showed that the hemoglobin levels were the same for the daily and weekly. The level of serum ferritin (SF) was higher in the daily dosage group. It was the group that was given the ferrous sulfate on a weekly rate that had a slightly higher amount of vertical growth, at about just 3 mm more. The total number of children who participated in the program was about 400.

Iron deficiency derived Anemia was gone though.

Based on the two studies, and the dozens of other studies that is referenced, I would like to make a few guesses on what this all means.

Most developing nations, where the children don’t get regular access to meat and sources of high protein, have stunted growth. One of the main ways the growth is stunted is not getting enough iron in the blood. Parents who believe that they should only be feeding their children vegetarian diets are depriving their children of certain minerals, like iron, which is hard to get from vegetables and fruit.

If we remember, the traditional idea is that the East Asians, specifically the Japanese, are below average in stature. The Japanese have always had a diet high on seafood and fish, which is high in iodine, but low in iron. After hundreds of years, the Japanese, along with other East Asian females developed higher rates of Anemia (due to Iron Deficiency), Short stature, and Osteoporosis.

Obviously women have smaller appetites. Based on a study in Canada (British Columbia), the adult male is supposed to get 8 mg of iron, while women are supposed to get 18 mg of iron. In addition, when the female is pregnant, she should be getting 27 grams of iron, to account for the fact that the developing fetus in her uterus is sucking away the calcium and iron levels from her body to form itself. East Asian females in particular are notorious for not eating enough, and trying to loss weight through dieting.

There are just too many stories of women who develop osteoporosis from pregnancy.

I personally suspect that this condition that pregnant human females develop, known as Pica, (the unusual desire or craving for strange food like dirt), is the body telling the female that she needs a source of calcium, or iron fast.

Eating strange things, like dirt, paint, soil, clay, ash, etc. is a common practice in some countries in Africa, like Kenya. There is even a store in Georgia selling clay for pregnant expectant mother under the name Kaolin (aka Geophagic Earth). Further research on the internet validated the idea that the medical condition known as Pica seems to be related to Iron Deficiency. Clay itself has a high level of calcium, iron, magnesium, and copper.

This might tangentially explain why a small minority of females have reported (only anecdotally) growing taller after pregnancy, sometimes by as much as 2.5 inches. It might not just be the relaxin effect, or the loss of calcium from their bones. It might also be the increased levels of consumption of iron in their diet, through very strange cravings.

What this post is suggesting is that it might be a good idea to make sure that the developing child and the pregnant female is getting a lot of iron, calcium, and minerals through her system to maximize health and final adult height.

I am willing to make a bet that as much as 3-5% of all females can gain around 1 Inch of extra height through their first pregnancy, if they can get their stimulated relaxin, calcium, PTHrP, and Iron levels just right, so they all operate at exactly the right step (in this multistep process) to remodel the tensile strength of the bones (by reducing Calcium Hydroxyapatite crystals embedded in the Organic ECM), turning them almost collagenous in nature (using increased PTHrP level), relaxing the surrounding soft tissue like tendons using relaxin, and then re-hardening the bones up through increased Iron and Calcium levels.

1. One’s Penis/Genitalia – Ex: Size, length, girth, aesthetics, and it’s ability to stay erect, impotence
2. One’s Sexual Ability & Performance – Ex: To satisfy their female partner, Premature Ejaculation, Comparing one’s accomplishments/abilities to their wife/gf’s previous romantic partners
3. One’s Hair – Ex: Loss of hair, male pattern baldness, thinning and greying
4. One’s Finances – Ex: Not having enough spending power
5. One’s Body – Ex: Not buff, no muscle, too thin, no 6-pack
6. One’s level of success in one’s chosen profession/career/job – Ex: Have not reached one’s goals
7. One’s Education Level – Ex: How does oneself compare to one’s peers and likely romantic partner
8. One’s Romantic/Sexual Experience – Ex: Lack of experience
9. One’s Health – Ex: Chronic problems, like heart disease, cancer scare,
10. One’s Social Status – Ex: Not having the respect of one’s peers, friends, family, coworkers
11. One’s Level of Intelligence Compared to Others – Ex: Obviously being less intelligent than others
12. One’s Height/Stature – Ex: Obviously it would be if one is shorter than average

(Yes, I realize that there is actually 12 that I listed)

If you go talk with most adult men in this modern age, and you asked them the questions

• “What do you worry about?”
• “What keeps you up at night and gets you stress out?”
• “Tell me something that you have never told anyone else about?”
• “What types of insecurities do you have?”

These 12 things are probably the most common problems that the average guy will tell you. There will obviously be other things that men will talk about, and some strange weird things they get stressed out about but, these 12 issues will be the things that will be brought up over and over again.

If we go down the list of things we should be worried about, one’s health should come first. If you don’t have your health, you have nothing. It doesn’t matter how well you are doing in your professional life or how much money you have. If you are not healthy, you don’t have the opportunity to enjoy it.

Let’s look at everything on this list and ask the reader – Which of these insecurities are factors which would be most obvious to a total stranger who know almost nothing about you?

Obviously it would be the physical.

You can hide the size of your genitalia, your sexual ability, sexual history, level of finances (unless you dress like a slob or are homeless), your education level, your social status, your level of intelligence, level of success in your career, but it is your physical attributes that people will obviously notice immediately. This is how people make their initial judgement on who you are as a person.

In fact, one can be poor, uneducated, no career, no sexual experience, and with low social status, but all of those aspects one can work on. People would tell you that life is a marathon, not a sprint, so you can take years, if not decades to work on becoming wealthy, educated, have a fulfilling career (or multiple careers), have many sexual experiences with a lot of partners, and improve one’s social statues by gaining the respect and admiration of one’s friend’s peers.

As for things like one’s level of intelligence or size of one’s genitalia, those are more genetic than the others, which one can put time, energy, and effort into. Being intelligent is indeed a big requirement in this society which men worry about, but that can be worked on through education, learning, and surrounding oneself with people who are much smarter.

The size/look of one’s genitalia, there seems to be some techniques which can help with that issue, which many young men swear works for them.

This means that a man’s hair, his body, and his height will be the 3 areas which other people will be making a judgement on, which he might have some level of insecurity about.

• One’s Hair – Ex: Loss of hair, male pattern baldness, thinning and greying
• One’s Body – Ex: Not buff, no muscle, too thin, no 6-pack
• One’s Height/Stature – Ex: Obviously it would be if one is shorter than average

As for one’s body, most adult males fill out in width over time. The way the human body works is that while one is very thin when they are still growing vertically when they were younger, their chest and waist eventually grows in width as they reach their 30s and 40s. Very few men ever stay completely skinny throughout their entire lives, especially Americans.

When it comes to the body, one can go to the gym, and over time make themselves muscular, toned, and have a flat stomach.

As for hair, many men these days are actually preferring to shave their head to accentuate their image of masculinity. When their hair starts to thin, or becomes gray, the men choose the shaved look.

Then it comes down to height. Let’s talk about that in the next post, which I will entitle “Is Height Really That Big Of An Issue With Men?”

I don’t care much about American politics or plan to watch the debates going on these days between the presidential candidates of 2016. However, I was looking at the The Daily Mail news yesterday and they had 1 picture that had the candidates standing side by side next to each other.

Out of the dozen plus candidates, there was one candidate that really “stood out” from the crowd. He looked like he was 5-6 inches taller than Donald Trump. So I did what a normal, curious person did. I googled the heights of donald trump and this guy. Of course, first I had to figure out who this candidate was.

Me, being a person who doesn’t know anything about politics, I had to go down the list of short biographic info to figure out who this person is. Well, it is Jeb Bush.

So Wikipedia says Jeb Bush is 6′ 3”. and Wikipedia says that Donald Trump is either 6′ 2” or 6′ 3”. The Donald has claimed 6′ 3” a few times in the past.

Since Donald Trump is almost 70 years old, we can assume that he probably is not the 6′ 3” that he claims to be, although he might have been that tall at his maximum, at some point in his life. People often loss about 1 inch of height when they reach 50, compared to their maximum. When they are around 70, that height loss could be as dramatic as a full 3 inches of loss, on average.

I would make an educated guess and say that Trump is now 6′ 2”, which is still a very good height to be in. Remember seeing him on a book cover once with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki who claims he is 6′ 2″ and Trump was noticeable taller. He will not be disqualified or thought badly by any voters for being shorter than his opponents.

As for Jeb, he just towered over Trump. At the time, last night, I was puzzled at how there could be that much of a discrepancy between them. I did not look at their shoes, or how they were standing.

Well, I wake up today and the DailyMail puts the news of the fact that Jeb Bush was standing on his toes at the top news of the day. The people at reddit/r/short picked it up too and are now talking about it. This type of news will most likely be talked about on all of the internet boards where people focus on height and being short.

The comments that are coming in are mostly average, where people are talking about Jeb’s insecurity and his desire to just look more dominant.

What most people will agree on is that this slight action taken by Jeb, which has now been noticed by millions of people who read Daily Mail and watched the debates, is that Jeb is not the most confident man in the world. He absolutely looks to be 6′ 3”, and clearly among the tallest of the candidates. He should not need to stand on his tiptoes to appear taller for the photos. This will be a gaff that the other candidates might take and use as a weapon against him later on if he stays in the running.

So what would make a guy who is already 6′ 3” want look even taller, maybe up to 6′ 6”- 6′ 7”? Some people have said that this idea is not his but credited to someone in his campaign party. They understand the importance of height and wanted to emphasize Jeb’s great height even further to make himself look stronger than the others in the group. Fair Enough.

If it is his idea, then it could be a character reveal. This guy is just not that confident in his own abilities to be a great potential president. Now that I am looking at the other candidate’s shoes, I am almost positive that there would also be 2-3 other candidates who are wearing extra-thick insoles or lifts, to give themselves a possible edge in the polls.

For Jeb, based on his intrinsic personality traits, being brash and quick in conversation might not be his strong-suit. You look at Trump and you can see that he is a good talker, smooth with words, and when people start throwing the hard questions as Trump, he knows how to deal with it. Trump has a rather large ego and is quite brash, but he projects such an assertive image and tone that most people would not question his willingness to be a leader who can take charge. Of course we all realize that there is a clear line of demarcation between a person being confident, and a person being arrogant.

Jeb should have sat down and learned in great depth all the topics that he is planning on talking about, if he is really thinking about becoming the future president of the US. I don’t have a strong opinion on him as a person, and living through his brother’s and fathers terms in office, I do become wary in his ability, if political intelligence can be passed down genetically.

When it comes to confidence, Jeb doesn’t have a lot. He is not charismatic, but he does have some things going for him. His 6′ 3” height would have helped him slightly in the polls, but now this fiasco might have nullified that advantage. His ability to speak Spanish fluently would help him slightly, but these days, almost everyone can speak Spanish now. I speak Spanish at a conversational level.

Personally I don’t think Jeb has any type of insecurity with his height (too old, too rich, and too tall), but there would be many guys who would do a similar action in that type of situation to overcompensate.

So is confidence really enough to stop the insecurity?

Based on my own life experiences, I would say that confidence is enough for maybe 75% of cases of men who complain about how short they are. Most of the individuals (specifically males) who have an issue with their height are often not that short to begin with. They often range from 5′ 7” – 5′ 10”. They just don’t reach that magical cutoff height of 6′ 0”. They probably compare themselves with their guy friends, who seem to be all much taller than them. These friends who are average with just average intelligence with large egos, uses what they do have to feel better about themselves, and probably like to tease and joke on the guy in their group is the smallest. It is a very college frat-type thinking.

This suggests that a short male’s insecurity is not something they developed themselves, but something that they acquired after years of interactions with their fellow male peers.

True confidence that is unshakable would be enough for guys in the 5′ 7”-5′ 10” group. They honestly have nothing to worry about. Spent $600 on a sharp suit, $300 on a pair of shoes, put on some diamond stud earrings, and a $1000 rolex and few people would ever think about talking bad about this person, especially after people reach a certain age. A well dressed and put together man who projects confidence and holds presence is a person most socially intelligent people would not be teasing on over appearance.

Even if you don’t feel truly confident, I suggest that one spends the money, put on this attire, and just try out the philosophy “Fake It Til You Make It”. Most guys would instantly notice that people’s perception of them and their level of respect increases dramatically. Women will be friendler to them and smile more, which may or may not be a sign that they are romantically interested in them.

However, we must also be realistic. The suit, shoes, and rolex will work, but up to a certain point. The cocky/confidence attitude works until it stops. Once a guy is below a certain height, even those external changes can’t stop the haters completely.

A guy who is 5′ 4” who is completely put together and immaculately dressed will on ocassion come across some 6 feet tall slob with little emotional or social intelligence who tries to heckle and belittle him on his physical short coming. It is in those types of social situations where one’s “Fake it Till You Make It” projected image will be tested. To have real confidence means that one can hold one’s frame without any of the loss of presence.

Ultimately, to have true, TRUE confidence means that that one is not swayed by the external elements, but has a diamond strong inner core of confidence. One is extremely comfortable in who they are, does not have any need to question or defend their identity. They know what they value and what they believe in and doesn’t feel the need to tell everyone about it.

When they are in a professional setting, they are respected and their coworkers, bosses, or employees listen to them because they are good at their job. They have a high level of cognitive, emotional, and social intelligence, aka maturity.

In a personal setting, on a date, they will not be so lucky or respected. The arena of love, dating, sex, and relationships is a true battlefield. We are just animals at the most basic level. A lot of our actions and decisions have already been programmed into our biology from billions of years of evolution. A certain percentage of the heterosexual female population will judge their potential male romantic partners based on physical stature. Being so below the average height will absoutely mean that some females will reject them. If one is even shorter, like 5′ 0” – 5′ 2” then it would be extremely hard.

Super-confidence will break down, since our biology/instinctual/evolutionary programing kicks in. Since we are physical beings, the physical needs will override all else, when we are placed in a state of great stress, pain, or loss. When a guy is 5′ 0”, confidence will still matter, but luck will become just as important. Some men who have become slightly more successful like to believe that the benefits and rewards they got in life from their effort is mostly based on their work. However, in a thought experiment, where we got a chance to live our lives a 2^nd time, but placed in a different birth situation, many of these successful people would not become the success that they were in the 1^st life, at least not at that level. Luck, that will be the most important aspect when all of the factors that one can control (fashion, dress, income, professional achievements) has been maximized, since luck is what we can’t control.

It may be true that luck is something that we can work to our favor, where opportunity meets preparation (Opportunity + Preparation = Luck). However, we must remember again that preparation is the part that we have control over, but opportunity is what we don’t have control over. We can work very hard and become prepared for a great opportunity. However, for some people, the element of “opportunity” never comes around. If it does appear in our life, we are not smart enough or experienced enough in our life to recognize that an opportunity has presented to ourselves. Based on bad timing, the opportunity is lost.

Since we are all born, we are almost all given a fair share of chances in pursuing what we want, some more than others, (as evidenced by Warren Buffett’s speech on his idea of being born in Bangladesh). However, there will be some people who will loss, based on things that they have no control over.

One of my sources which I read up on the latest biotechnology news is the website www.fiercebiotech.com. The type of reader who usually reads these websites are people who are trying to learn about startup companies which are still at a stage where they are willing to accept small investments/funding by semi-rich investors as a type of Angel Investor. The news aggregator website gives small pieces of news that are being released by the startup’s PR department to get people talking.

Something that was mentioned in a few posts from 2-4 years ago was this company called Histogenics which has been trying to get the implanted hyaline cartilage to work out for people who are suffering from osteoarthritis pain. Refer to this article written back in 2012 “Histogenics Closes $49 Million Series A Fundraising to Support Commercial Development of Transformational Cartilage Repair Products“. This is when i started the website and back then I wrote about the technology/product that they have. The old post is “NeoCart Autologous Cartilage Tissue Implant For Cartilage Regrowth And Replacement“. 3 Years later, I think I can give a much more detailed look at their research and give a more educated guess on their future endeavors.

In some ways, what they are doing or trying to do is very, VERY similar to at least half a dozen other research labs I have discovered in the last 3 years. I wrote a post just a few weeks ago about a university research team who is doing something very similar, but the other team has not decided to take their technique out of the lab yet for a larger scale application.

Refer to this section I took from the first link above…

“….Histogenics’ flagship products focus on the treatment of active patients suffering from articular cartilage derived pain and immobility. The Company takes an interdisciplinary approach to engineering neocartilage that looks, acts and lasts like hyaline cartilage. It is developing new treatments for sports injuries and other orthopedic conditions, where demand is growing for long-term alternatives to joint replacement. Histogenics has successfully completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials in which the NeoCart autologous tissue implant’s effectiveness is compared to that of standard microfracture surgery.”

Of course this article was from 3 years ago. Now, if you go to the products page (Here) of the Histogenics website, you can see that they are now doing Phase 3. Phase 3 has its description on the website ClinicalTrials.gov, which we are all very familiar with. – Confirmatory Study of NeoCart in Knee Cartilage Repair

It would seem that the information for the Clinical Trial of the NeoCart platform was just updated last month.

Like they said, their approach is… “implantation of an cartilagenous tissue implant derived from the patients own cells.” this is in comparison, to the other well known approach of microfracture surgery.

They even give a contact information if you want to be a subject/patient in their phase 3 clinical trials – Kathleen Large – 18559636227 – NeoCartContactCenter@UBC.com or at NeoCartImplant.com.

From the UBC part, it seems that the implantation process will take place at UBC, which might stand for British Columbia, Canada.

It seems that for the previous Phase, Phase II, the entire process took them 2 full years, You can read up on the results of that full 2 years from this source – Crawford et al. J Bone Joint Surg Am. 2012;94:979-89. This previous clinical trial Phase was done at San Antonio Orthopaedic Group (TSAOG) and headed by Orthopedic surgeon Brad S. Tolin, M.D. They even had a commercial done on asking for people who wanted to join in the treatment.

Let’s summarize the findings of Phase 2, as reported by Histogenics to the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commition), which is what is required for most public companies each quarter. This is what they stated at the very end. (source)

“…Our preliminary findings strongly suggest that using the NeoCart autologous cartilage tissue implant significantly decreases knee pain and improves function within six months after treatment and provides significantly greater improvements than microfracture.”

The Big Questions We Should Be Asking Now

So if you are a regular reader of this website, and you understand the scientific words I use, then you obvious would have realized that I reported in a post just last month of a research team from Ohio State Universtiy who has done what seems to be the exact same thing.

I am referring to the post “Scientists Have Gotten Cartilage To Grow In The Lab From Explanted Seed Chondrocyte Cells And Reimplanted Back Into Patient“. Here, it was from the Wexner Medical  Center and the research group leader (or maybe just spokemen) was a David C Flanigan. A person scraped their knee from a skateboard accident and they lost some meniscus and articular cartilage. The guys as Wexner Medical Lab took some of chondrocytes from his body as a seed, grew it to cartilage, and implanted it into his knee and he seems to okay now.

So are these two groups doing the exact same thing? 

For the final result, no, they are the same thing. However, on their approach, it is slightly different. In the previous post, I wrote that the in-vitro cartilage from OSU when implanted back into the cartilage defect, the most likely result is that while the ACI (Autologous Cartilage Implant) would fuse/bind with the cartilage around it, it generally will eventually develop into fibrocartilage tissue. This is the criticism I gave in that post, and showing that the research that was done at OSU is a step in the right direction, but they just haven’t pushed to a point where I should be giving them too much credit.

At the end of that post, I said that microfracture surgery might be easier, and better than what Wexner has created. Well, in Phase II of Histogenics clinical trials, they showed that their autologous cartilage implantation is better than microfracture surgery. Based on the transitive property (where A>B, and B>C thus A>C), this shows that the Histogenics approach is better than what is available at OSU. Of course, this is assuming that my suggestion at the end of the first post is accurate, that microfracture surgery would be more effective than the stuff Flanigan’s team offered.

The people at Histogenics are able to make a structure that is very similar to hyaline cartilage. This is where they are ahead, at least 1 step ahead. Keep in mind that in the older post, in 2012, they said that they got the in-vitro generated cartilage to be just like hyaline cartilage. I would assume that after 3 more years of research, and then reaching Phase 3, they got the hyaline cartilage down.

To see how far they are at, You can go a little further and do a quick Google Patent Search and type in the word “Histogenics” into the Patent Database. There was a patent called “Acellular matrix implanted into an articular cartilage or osteochondral lesion protected with a biodegradable polymer modified to have extended polymerization time and methods for preparation and use thereof – WO 2005018429 A8“. A 30 second read of the abstract tells you that while creating bone implants is very easy, they state that the patent is technically to treat articular cartilage.

For us, we are now 1 step further!!!

It just seemed like 2 week ago I said that we were maybe 2-3 steps away. Well 2 weeks later, I report to the readers that 1 more step has been taken. We are now essentially 1-2 steps away.

There is seriously just 1 last step to go, but that last step to go from hyaline cartilage for articular cartilage to epiphyseal type will be a big leap. Alsberg is working on it, as well as people like Gordana Novakovic. Alsberg has already jumped into the last step, trying to get it to work. However, no one has yet been willing to go from the 2nd to last step to the final step yet. This is where we will see real funding into the venture come about.

What do we need to see to make take the final step?

We would need the funding from a billionaire source. I read just today from MIT Technology Review that the Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel has put in funding to the cancer fighting startup StemCentrx. He talked about the fact that Biotech funding is very tricky. Conventional biotech research is sort of like a shotgun approach, where you try thousands of combinations of stuff and hope one has a useful result. Thiel realises that to make biotech startups less costly, and easier to fund, biotechnology has to evolve to a point, where research is more of a sniper-approach, where the element of randomness is reduced, and you can actually predict and design out what you want for a result. The book that I am writing currently, which I predict won’t be finished for another 3-4 years, will be the step that Thiel is talking about, where we predict and design the exact steps to take the final step.

This is one of those posts which will probably be more controversial. However, on this type of website, I don’t pull any punches. I tell the people everything, and hold nothing back.

Maybe half of the people who write to me are young enough where they are still growing, around the age of 15-18, and they ask me what can they do to help get that extra 3-4 inches before their bones completely fuse.

The most logical answer would be to just do what the average endocrinologist does, which is to get injections of rHGH (Recombinant Human Growth Hormone). Yes, there are another 2 dozen other compounds I can suggest after doing this type of research for the last 3 years, but let’s focus on the most obvious way, which has been proven to be effective by medical professionals for over 30 years.

Of course, to suggest that one get rHGH, there are many concerns by people, like safety, legality, and efficacy.

• Safety – Is taking HGH even safe?
• Legality – Is it legal to buy HGH in the US?
• Efficacy – Even if I got the rHGH, would it even work?

Safety – This is usually the first thing people think about. Our health is the most important thing. Well, from my personal research, I have not found any case of people who actually developed a severely negative side effect from taking synthetic HGH. HGH is naturally produced in our body by the anterior area of the pituitary gland. The level of growth hormone that is released by the pituitary gland varies. However, the release is greater when we are asleep, compared to wakefulness. The release is greater during the summer than the other seasons. Also, the release is greater during our puberty years than when we are older, as adults.

In my opinion, until people can show me 3 PubMed studies which show that a high level of HGH is bad (excluding Acromegaly) then I say that it is safe. In fact, the benefits of GH are great. GH helps people feel younger, stronger, loss weight, and have more stamina. What people are more likely to associate with health risk is steroids. Steroids is actually synthetic testosterone, which is completely different from HGH. While GH is produced in the head, testosterone is produced in the reproductive organs and the internal organs. There is synthetic GH and there is synthetic testosterone. Bodybuilders often use both to build muscle mass.

Legality – I have not done the necessary searching on Google to see whether it is legal. However, I would assume that it would not be as a big of problem as steroids. When it comes to steroids, people have a very negative opinion from multiple cases of bodybuilders who went bad. With rHGH, it should be more lenient. A quick search Google reveals many websites claiming that you can order the stuff. One website I just found out about is hgh suppliers. Another resource which I would recommend much more is the renegade researcher Ellis Toussier. Read my review on him in a previous post here. Toussier claims to have been living in Mexico since the 80s, and he has been injecting young kids which the real synthetic compound hundreds of times, for parents who are concerned with their kids who might be short or have a GH deficiency. He claims that he lives really close to a Eli Lilly Factory where they make the real rHGH and he has a contact on the inside to get the protein as a extremely low price. You can even find Toussier on Linkedin.

Efficacy – When it comes to effectiveness, we know from reading hundreds of PubMed study articles that done properly, at the right dosage, the compound does work. Some people, who have not done the necessary reading, might claim that HGH injections would not make a young kid grow taller than what they have always been pre-programmed by their genes from birth. They state that if one does not have a GH Deficiency, the HGH therapy would not be effective. Technically, that is not true.

The reason it is not true is based on the hundreds of instances where people develop gigantism. We know Gigantism is a real medical condition. We also know that Gigantism turns into Acromegaly after the person’s bones fuse. Does this mean that for a person to develop extreme height, they have a growth hormone deficiency condition as well as having an increased pituitary gland activity?

We look at cases like Tanya Angus, Adam Rainier, and Brahim Takioullah and can make the case that all of these cases had the person have an overactive pituitary gland. The gland often has a tumor that is benign. The gland released more GH in the system, often at a rate 10-20X as much as normal. The natural form and the synthetic form has the same function. Since an increased stimulation of GH into the system causes these cases resulting in extreme height, do the person also have a deficiency? Since the argument made by the GH naysayers is that the therapy won’t work without a GH deficiency. Well, it does work.

We have shown that this chemical is safe, can be easily bought, and does work, if used properly.

Here are some resources which I suggest the person start looking at if they want to try it out.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/steroids/ – Note: Remember that HGH is NOT a Steroid. They are 2 different things. People like to categorize them as one thing, and lump them together, but they are very different.
• https://www.eroids.com/pics/where-to-buy-legit-hgh-and-increase-your-odds-of-getting-a-good-product-.-the-definitive-guide
• https://hghsuppliers.com/

This chemical is very expensive though. The chemical industry’s standard of unit is the IU, and for just a few IUs it would cost a person into the thousands. This chemical compound is not cheap.

What I can recommend to people is this. Don’t buy any type of GH from China or India. It is just too dangerous based on customs people taking the compound away and from the possibility that the chemical will breakdown along the way on the ship or plane. If you want to get real, good GH, go to Mexico. Companies like Eli Lilly, who was the first company to synthesize HG back in the 70s, have their factories in Mexico and sometimes in the Philippines now. Get the real thing. Don’t trust anything sold on Alibaba, AliExpress, or Amazon.

However, I have personally purchased Nootropics from India with success before though. I have tried Piracetam, Phenibut, Kratom, L-Theanine, and Modafinil. Nootropic stacks are similar to the steroid/hgh stacks bodybuilders use. Learn how to do them right. Get educated and join the LongeCity forums.

A year ago, I found a good resource www.modup.net from the reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/modup/. Talk to Sophie and she will help you guys out. Even if the customs people take away your order, they will send out a replacement for free.

As for needles, look on AliExpress.com for needles which are often really cheap ($5-10 per set). Amazon will never sell needles for legal and safety reasons. If you guys can’t find places to buy needles, contact the customer service reps of the semi-annual Canton Fair to ask for a listing of medical equipment suppliers/factories in China.

Anyone who has every considered the idea of possibly going through with the process of limb lengthening surgery to make their body longer aka taller has also asked the question “Will I still look proportional after the surgery?”.

This point was mentioned once again in a comment as a response to the previous post, about the good news of the research Dr. Alsberg has been working on. That news was definitely a game changer.

The obvious concern is that while height and looker taller is important, it is equally important that their body still looks proportional. The feared result after the procedue to make one’s tibia or femur longer is that either the torso, the arms, limbs, or head might look small or short now.

To get a more in depth access to people who ask such questions, visit the forum website www.limblengtheningforum.com 

In response to people who have this type of fear or concern, I would like to refer them to multiple studies that I have accumulated over the last 3 years. The average person on the street who doesn’t think about their height and body proportions as we do (the regulars of this website) probably have not heard of the concept of a person’s “Wingspan”. The wingspan of a person is the length from the tip of one’s left middle finger to the tip of the right middle finger, when the person has fully stretched out their arms.

In many sports, particularly basketball, boxing, and football (quarterback position), the length of one’s arm’s (aka reach) is very important. In athletics, while height is almost always mentioned, the wingspan will also be brought up in these sports.

The generally accepted rule (based on probably Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vetruvium Man sketch) is that the wingspan of a person will be the same as one’s height. The data that has come out from national censuses, collection of data of anthropometric studies done over the decades is that the wingspan of a person is on average slightly longer than the height. In males, the wingspan/height ratio is even more skewed. I can’t find the study at this moment, but the average ratio of wingspan/height is around 1.02/1, for males.

Based on a just an initial hypothesis, it sort of makes sense when one realizes that while the feet and torso is always putting load/weight on the legs, the arms don’t have any load placed on them. While the growth plates in the legs have to push against the force of gravity, the growth plates in the arms are not, at least downwards. This means that the arms are on average, going to grow just slightly more than the legs, without the constraint of gravity pushing down on them.

So my first point is, it is most likely that for the short male who is asking, their wingspan will be longer than their height. An extra 3-5 cm to their vertical length will not cause a big proportionality problem since their width length is already there.

Here is my 2nd argument. People who develop short stature, from some form of real medical condition develop a normal/proportional sized torso and head, but their limbs suffer. Achrondroplasia, which is the most common medical condition causing severe short stature, most often results in a person with a normal body, (with normal sized had and torso) but with exceptionally short limbs. This means that for their condition, it would makes sense just to lengthen the arms and legs, and never touch the skull, neck, spine, or torso area.

Achondroplasia is often caused by an increased level of FGFR3. Studies have shown that inhibiting the effect of FGFR3 removes the effects of achondroplasia. However, it only works by first realizing that one’s unborn child has the condition, and a gene therapist going into the embryo and editing the genetic makeup of the embryo before the baby is ever even born.

The same can be seen with GDF5 (growth-differentiation factor 5) – mice that were bred to not have this gene being expressed develop relatively normal torsos and bodies, but their limbs (arms and legs) were severely shortened. It seems that there are many ways to make a person shorter, and the most common ways to do that is to cause some genetic issue of their limb development.

So if a person is worried about proportionality, they should not be worried about the length or size of their torso.

In fact, in the beginning of this website, I made a theory/hypothesis from watching my own body, and the Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps body. People who are big eaters when they are young, who develop to be taller than average, seem to have their height disproportionately in their torso. Thus the torso length/leg length ratio is larger. The next time you see an adult male who is both tall and obese, look to see whether their torso/body seem to be particularly long. More likely than not.

My point here is that, to increase the length of one’s torso, it seems to be possible by being a big eater when one was younger, before they stopped growing.

This is true with people like Yao Ming. In pictures of Yao Ming sitting down with other NBA Players which I analyzed years ago, it seems that Yao seems to get his great height from his torso. When he was sitting down, he would still tower over other professional basketball players, but when you look at his legs, he has similar leg length as the others. Compare this to someone like Wilt Chamberlain, who got his great height mainly from his long legs, specifically the femur.

However, I realize that I never really answered the original question, the title of this post. – “Can We Find A Way To Make People Taller And Also Keep Their Body And Limbs Proportional?”

My 1st Point – On average, for men, their wingspan is actually longer than their height. If they go through with surgery, they should not need to worry about the disproportionality of their arms to their new longer legs.

My 2nd Point – I theorized from a few examples of people’s bodies that one can increase the length of one’s torso, at least when one is still growing, by eating more, (meat, grains, vegetables, dairy). After one stops growing, obviously it won’t be possible.

My 3rd point – Most people are not as height and proportion obsessed as us. They either don’t care or will never notice. After the leg lengthening, one may look at the mirror and focus only on the shortness of one’s arms or body, but most people will not even notice a difference.

Real Answer: In theory, anything is possible. Maybe one day in the far future, we will be able to make people not just taller, but also get the other organs and structures in the body to grow with the leg bones. However, in my educated opinion, after looking at this problem over and over again for over 3 years, there is only 2 ways that I can see. Technically, the 2 techniques that I propose are in essence the exact same physiological process. The difference is whether one chooses a very hard problem to solve, or an insanely hard problem to solve.

Technique #1: To be able to make the entire body to grow again, scientists will have to find the solution to reverse aging of the human body itself, to the extreme case of Benjamin Button. This would most likely require that the human body be placed in a chamber with amniotic fluid, which is a similar function to acid in Ph to soften/rubberize the bones to remove the Base-like (Ph-wise) hydroxyapatite crystals which makes bone hard. The fluid the body is in seeps into the human body, and converts the bones back into cartilage or cartilagenuous type tissue.

This technique would involve probably decades (if not centuries) of research in learning how to not just stop aging, but also to reverse aging, to actually turn a 60 year old women with skin full of wrinkles. to a 16 year old girl with supple, wrinkle free skin. Scientists would need to study how telomeres work, how the junk microRNAs work, which of the thousands of the genes in our chromosomes control the role of height, how to use the CRISPR-Cas9 technique, gene editing, gene therapy, how to increase the Hayflick Limit, how to stop oxidation chemical reactions from causing free radical buildup in the cells, particularly around the mitochondria area. To give a reference of what this would be like, we would have to reach the technological level of the Kryptonians from the Superman story. A true galactic master race/species who have already conquered inter-space travel. To have this type of technology, we would need to be a much, MUCH more technological advanced species to build this type of technology.

This proposal, I am not holding my breathe for, at least in my lifetime. It is way too science fiction for me.

Technique #2: Scientists figure out how to get transdifferentiation to work out – changing bone tissue to cartilage tissue. Eben Alsberg has proposed this idea, which would suggest that if he is successful, and other researchers pursue his ideas further, maybe in 50 years, they would figure out how to get the bones to turn into cartilage with a series of simple needle injections of various material (growth factors, chondromodulin, TGF-Beta, GDF5, chondrocyte seeds, pathway signalling proteins, MSCs) in the local area of where the growth plate once was, the bone area will magically turn into a “new growth plate”. This would basically be “reopening the growth plate”. If it is successful in one area of the body, the same series of needle injections will be injected in the 20-30 other areas of the adult skeleton where there once was epiphyseal hyaline cartilage tissue to work with.

This idea, it seems more viable, but I don’t see anything like this coming about at least for another 50-70 years down the line, and that is being super optimistic and making a guess at the exponential rate of technological growth based on Kurzweil’s Law of Exponential Growth.