It feels like a lot of the blog I follow these days is in the realm of health and fitness. Nutrition is always a critical element in health and fitness and what seems to be really big these days is the Paleo Diet. I have heard about the Paleo Diet for at least 3 years now and it seems to have gotten into the public awareness. The proponents of the Paleo Diet talk about the benefits of it which includes like increased energy, feeling better and stronger, and being more in touch with one’s body.

So first, what is the Paleo Diet? I take a section from the Wikipedia article on it HERE.

The paleolithic diet (abbreviated paleo diet or paleodiet), also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that various hominid species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic era—a period of about 2.5 million years duration that ended around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. In common usage, such terms as the “Paleolithic diet” also refer to the actual ancestral human diet.

Centered on commonly available modern foods, the “contemporary” Paleolithic diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, vegetables, fruit, fungi, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils.

….Paleolithic nutrition is based on the premise that modern humans are genetically adapted to the diet of their Paleolithic ancestors and that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, and therefore that an ideal diet for human health and well-being is one that resembles this ancestral diet. Proponents of this diet argue that modern human populations subsisting on traditional diets allegedly similar to those of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are largely free of diseases of affluence, and that two small prospective studies of the Paleolithic diet in humans have shown some positive health outcomes. Supporters point to several potentially therapeutic nutritional characteristics of allegedly preagricultural diets.

Me: There are of course a lot of controversy and criticism of this “new” diet trend.

This dietary approach is a controversial topic amongst dietitians and anthropologists, and an article on the National Health Service of the United Kingdom Choices website suggests that it may be afad diet. Critics have argued that if hunter-gatherer societies failed to suffer from “diseases of civilization”, this was mostly due to reduced calories in their diet, shorter average lifespans, or a variety of other factors, rather than some special diet composition. Some researchers have taken issue with the accuracy of the diet’s underlying evolutionary logic.

Also disputed are some dietary recommendations and restrictions on the grounds that they provide no health benefits or pose health risks and are not likely to accurately reflect the features of ancient Paleolithic diets.

A 2011 ranking by U.S. News & World Report, involving a panel of 22 experts, ranked the Paleo diet lowest of the 20 diets evaluated based on factors including health, weight-loss and ease of following.These results were repeated in the 2012 survey, where the diet placed 24^th out of 24, stating that their experts “took issue with the diet on every measure”. However, one expert involved in the ranking stated that a “true Paleo diet might be a great option: very lean, pure meats, lots of wild plants. The modern approximations… are far from it.” He quickly added that “duplicating such a regimen in modern times would be difficult.”^[24]

The ranking assumed a modernized offshoot to the paleo diet in which low-carb is emphasized, this diet specifically containing only 23% carbohydrates. Higher carbohydrate versions of the paleo diet, which allow for significant consumption of root vegetables, were not a part of this ranking. Loren Cordain, a proponent of a low-carbohydrate Paleolithic diet, responded to the U.S. News ranking, stating that their “conclusions are erroneous and misleading” and pointing out that “five studies, four since 2007, have experimentally tested contemporary versions of ancestral human diets and have found them to be superior toMediterranean diets, diabetic diets and typical western diets in regards to weight loss, cardiovascular disease risk factors and risk factors for type 2 diabetes.” The editors of U.S. News replied that their ranking included a review of all five studies which found that all of them were small and/or of short duration.

Me: However I am not going to get into the details of the Paleo diet, only what types of effect does the Paleo Diet have on the person’s growth and height. From my research on the Pelolithic man, we learn that the average height of humans at that time was believed to be around 

From this obviously biased website beyondveg.com we learn that the paleolithic male was supposed to be around 177 cm in height with a lifespan of 35.4 years while the paleolithic female had an average height of 166.5 cm in height with a life span of 30 years.

If we analyze the graph on the beyondveg.com website, we see that the height of humans in general seemed to have decrease as they moved away from the paleolithic time era to the mesolithic time era. The height average seems to decrease further and further moving into the early neolithic era to the late neolithic era.

From MarksDailyApple.Com the author writes this…

According to one study on remains of early Europeans, prior to 16,000 BC, European males stood 179 cm tall, or 5’10.5″, and females stood 158 cm, or 5’2″. Between 8,000 to 6,600 BC, average heights had dropped to 166 cm for males. Heights fell even further in Neolithic populations, dropping down to 164 cm for males and 150 cm for females, only reaching and surpassing 170 cm at the end of the 19th century.

Another source found that Paleolithic humans living between 30,000 and 9,000 BC ran almost 5’10″, which is close to the average modern American male’s height. After agriculture was fully adopted, male height dropped to 161 cm, or 5’5.4″. Females went from 166.5 cm to 154.3 cm under the same parameters.

We know these changes to height also reflected worsened health, because with shortness came dental pathologies like caries, plaque, and decay, signs of arrested growth indicating instances of severe malnutrition, and skull abnormalities that stem from iron deficiency. People got shorter, sicker, and less healthy. Height wasn’t a cause of poor health, of course, but it was an indicator.

Me: The main point to take away from this article is that it seems to appear that following a paleolithic diet (which is protein based) may result in greater height instead of eating a diet that is more carbohydrate based.

One of the biggest and most futuristic theories going around about the possible ways to increase our height has been the idea of using gene therapy through dna manipulation to allow for height increase. Here is what I can derive from the technology

The basic idea behind why we stop growing is that the growth plates seal from the human going through the natural process of aging, or senescence. At a certain stage in its physical maturation, somehow estrogen gets activated to start Puberty and after a certain amount of time after puberty starts, estrogen is used to signal again to start closing the growth plates. Well, it turns out the growth plates also go through a sort of senescence where over time in a human’s life, the layer of hyaline cartilage grows thinner and thinner, until one day the plate disappears.

With gene therapy, we can theoretically inject something on or in the bones and get the stem cells inside the medullary cavity to start to differentiate into chondrogenesis.

We can inject stem cells into a human beings in either a certain area and get that area to reverse in its senescence. We can change genes in the adult humans to push their physical maturity back in development to before puberty so that their bones can reverse into cartilage and they can go through another process of growth.

Harald of the Human Growth Research Initiative talks about the possibilities of using gene therapy for height increase HERE.

As for the use of gene therapy on adults it is still hard to get the technology to work correctly to be able to get either the entire body or certain body parts to reverse in aging or change in form and function to allow for height increase.

The big thing will be really for babies, and children. With gene therapy, potential parents who are short can ask a geneticist to change the genes in their future baby to allow them to get the tall genes (through gene exchange and dna splicing) and give them an edge in life from being tall. This type of thing was addressed in the movie Gattaca, and if I was to be realistic, it is a serious thing to consider. If I was to know that my future children was going to be short, I would personally be willing to use genetic engineering to fix them and give them as many extra inches to their height as possible so they will be not be disadvantaged in life.

When you are ever in one of those moods or states where you are focusing on your height or size, you will feel bad and get negative emotions. You can look at yourself naked in them mirror and wonder why is it that you have such a short torso, or short legs, or why your head is so much bigger than your body. You look at the Cosmo and Glamour magazines and feel envy towards the women on those covers and spreads. The women all seem to have the longest legs, and the most fit perfect bodies with not even an inch of cellulite showing.

Well, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that as for those taut, fit bodies in the pictures are almost all photoshopped. The picture gets edited after it is taken, and then reedited to enhance certain parts of the body (i.e. breasts) and to reduce other parts of the body (i.e. love handles).

As for the dimensions that are defined by the bone, like leg length, the photoshops even work on those. A legs can be slightly lengthened using a few photoshop tricks and one who looked like they were 6′ 0″ in the previous picture now look like they are 6′ 2″.

When you look in the mirror again, ask yourself this honest question, “Would I still have this negative image of my body and my size if everyone else in the world was only 4′ 6″?”

What if you were living with a tribe in the middle of Indonesia where the indigenous people were pygmies would you still think you are “short”? Of course, not. Like most objects and phenomenon in our world, everything is relative. There is almost no absolutes in this universe. When we say that we are rich, that does not mean that we have a billion dollars on our bank account. What we really said is more like “we have more money than 95% of the rest of the society we live in”. So when we say we are tall, we are saying that our height is really in the upper percentile of the society we live in.

If you really don’t like your size, you can always just move to a country where the average height of its people are lower than where you had come from. So if you are 5′ 8″ you can move to Vietnam and you would actually be more on the tall side after living there for a short while.

My whole point of this post is to say that our perception our what we think is a immutable fact like our height/size is actually not truly immutable. While It may be true we may never be able to change ourselves, we can change our surroundings to make ourselves on the big/tall percentile side of another nation or tribe in comparison if we decided to move. So, please learn to use the concept of relativity to define your size and you can actually learn to feel better about yourself. There are plenty of people in the world who are shorter than you and if we all tried, we can all find gratitude in all the inches in height we do have, not what height we do not have.

In a previous article post I did entitled “Tallest Female Teenager In The World – Who Is It?” I had mentioned that besides the original three female contenders, there was a new addition. That was Jessica Pardoe on the UK was at the age of 19 was 6′ 9″. Now, in that article I was really trying to figure out whether a girl can still be considered a teenager after she gets past the age of 18 since 2 of the 3 top contenders were 19 or older. Only the Brazilian Elisany Silva was still technically a teenager since she should be 16 at this time (late Aug. 2012).

However, it turns out that this website seems to get quite a bit of traffic from people who are searching up the name “Jessica Pardoe” on google and other search engine sites.

Well, it was recently reported that Jessica Pardoe had her height promoted once more, to a maximum height of 6′ 10″.

Here is Jessica meeting 6′ 9″ Caroline Welz, the tallest woman in Germany. From the video it look like Caroline may actually be taller than Jessica but a look at their shoes would show that Caroline is wearing thick high heeled boots which can often give more than 2″ in extra height, and Jessica is wearing Teenager Converse-like shoes which give more like 0.5-0.75″ in extra height.

From the video on Youtube below where the story was reported by The Daily Star UK, Jessica Pardoe has grown from the mid 2011 story of her being 6′ 9″ to 6′ 10″ by only october of 2011. My real question then becomes, did Jessica really grow another inch in height from July 2011 when the news stated she was 6’9″ to 6’10” by October? If that is true then that is quite an insane growth spurt to go through.

This is just a question I always ask people who have expressed that they would like to be taller. So far in my life, I have met many family members, relatives, past girlfriends, and guy friends who have at some point proclaimed that they wished to be slightly taller.

However, for a few of these people, they were very adamant and almost obsessive about their desire to be taller. A girl I used to date who used to say that she was 5′ 1″ was really 5′ 0″ when I questioned her about it some more. When I asked her what she wished for more than anything in the world, she told me that she only wanted to be taller . I asked her about her professional dreams and what she wanted to do for a career and she didn’t have any desires and goals about them. I guess for her, she was insecure about her height.

I know that for a long time I was insecure about my height too. I tried to do some exercises and bought equipment to help me gain some extra inches (or centimeters) and I think for all of my work over 2 years, I got 0.25 of extra height, and I think I pushed from 5′ 11.75″ of height in the morning after I wake up to a height of 6′ 0″ (and slightly more) in the morning after waking up. I was very surprised the first time I measured myself and the tip of the top of my head hit the 6 foot mark. I was really glad and was not sure if it might have been a measurement error. So I double checked, and triple checked, and quadruple checked, and I found out that I had indeed grown or managed to push myself to over the 6 foot mark in height, at least in the morning after I wake up.

For me, I really wanted that extra quarter of an inch so that if I was ever on a first date with a girl and she asked me how tall I was, I could say that I was 6 foot and not lie about it. For so many girls these days, they have this strong cut off point in their own head of the minimum height their mate must be. On the internet/online dating websites, there are many women who actually set up their profile so that they can’t get emails or messages from men who are less than 6 foot tall. This means that some men on those sites will purposely lie and say that they are 6 foot when they are more like 5′ 11″ or 5′ 10″. For me, I have never used the internet or an online dating site to meet the opposite sex, but if I did, I would not want to lie about something like height. The people will eventually have to meet you, and at that moment, they know how tall you really are.

However, in the end it doesn’t matter and we all (the men and women) know that. A lot of guys like to joke that when they start doing the “horizontal tango” all issues of height disappear. I agree with these guys, but I can also point out that one can not always be doing the “horizontal tango” all the time. One does have to stand up again.

On my driver’s license when I got it first when I was 21 (I know, I was scared to drive and never took the driving test) I stated my height as 5′ 11″. After I lost that license and go a renewed license when I was 25, I decided to list my height as 6′ 0″. In the end, I am still to this day working on having good posture, walking correctly, and making sure I don’t lose the height I gained when I was younger when I get older. But that is really something that is beyond my control. For me, I do still sometimes feel insecure about my height. I feel I am too short. I feel that I am unattractive. I feel like I am not good enough. I feel like I may never be loved as much as I secretly desire inside. And all of this stuff just comes out and manifest in some bizarre behavior that other people might not understand and may find very strange.

So how about you, “Do you feel insecure about your height?”

                                             “Why are you insecure about your height?”

    “How badly do you desire to be taller than you are now?”

I have written articles talking about 7 feet tall people, 8 feet tall people, the tallest natural giants, the tallest twins, the tallest couples, the tallest toddlers, the tallest teenagers, the fattest people in history, the biggest babies in history, and everything else you could possibly think of. However that is one question that I have wanted to answer for the longest time…”Who was the largest/biggest person in history?”

Now that question is hard because now you have to consider more than one variable. When it comes to figure out who is bigger with height or weight, that is easy to do since it is one variable. To find the heaviest, you put a scale underneath them and note the number.With height, you put them next to a vertical measuring tape.

With looking for big, you have to take the two factors of height and weight together and weigh them out. In history, there has one who was just a lot “bigger” than the rest of people around. That would be Mills Darden of North Carolina.

There are no picture of this giant of a man and of the pictures on the internet, they are not of Darden himself but of someone else.

He was said to have been 7′ 6″ and weighed up to 1000 lbs. Now that is a very big man. From the Tallest Man website HERE, I paste the article on his life below…

Mills Darden – 7 feet 6 inches (228.6 cm)

Me: When it comes to these types of stories of people who were from the 19th century or any time before that when the picture and photograph had not been invented yet, it is really hard for someone ilke me to completely take the story and dimensions of this guy seriously. People back then were much smaller (shorter) and for anyone who was probably over 6′ 6″ they would have looked tremendously tall and people might have thought they were much bigger than they really are. If this guy was alive today, I would have definitely have liked to get him checked on how big he really is. Does that mean that I don’t believe this guy was as tall and heavy as the people back then proclaimed? Yeah, I would guess that this guy was not the 7’6″ height he was claimed at, but probably more like 7’0″. 

However, this is all just my own personal opinion. I still wanted to pay my respects to this person and don’t want to get into any argument of whether Mills Darden deserves the title of being called the “biggest man in history”. For this post, I really just want to state the information I found and let you interpret it how you would like.