Throughout my own life, I have noticed a weak correlation to people who are genetically supposed to be short or average height and their personal ambition. Most people would call this type of phenomena the Napoleon Complex but that was actually proved to be false. A new research reveals that in fact it is the tall men that are more likely to start an aggression in conflict situations. However, we are not talking about agression, but personality and personal ambition.

What I am talking about is that for many of the people I know from my childhood who was of particular short stature, their work ethic and driven personalities were always very visible. The perfect example is a childhood aquaintance I knew starting from my middle school days. He was always trying to take the highest level of classes, adding to his course load, and skipping meals to fulfill more professional obligations. There was at least one time when he fainted from working so hard and that freaked out his parents. The last time I saw him was when I was maybe 18 coming just ready to leave for college myself and he and I went to the local YMCA to play basketball. I noted that he was one of the shortest asian guys I have seen in a long time, maybe around 5’1″ -5’2″. When I was playing basketball ,I would do it for maybe 10 minutes and then give up and relax since I had not done basketball in so long. However, He kept on trying to play and would try over and over again to make just one basketball shot. His determination and will to achieve his goal was tremendous and my own father make a mark that I should emulate this guys focus and determination.

After he went to school at Cornell for Electrical Engineering, he spent the Summers working at two jobs, while trying at the same time trying to leave the Engineering world behind. He was always claiming that he wanted to get a job in Wall Street, work for some investment firm and become a junior analyst, and eventually an investment banker who would make $5 million a year. After college, after over a year of trying, he did finally find employment in Wall Street working for a firm but the Economic Recession of 2009 and onward made him loose his job, but he never stopped trying to achieve as much wealth and success as possible.

While this is just one case, I do often see some slight correlation. While it is true from the numbers that taller men are more likely to be promoted and earn more than their shorter counter parts, I would argue that the shorter men are more likely to be driven and ambitious than men who are taller. Whether the shorter of the men can succeed and overcome all of life’s bias agains them and choose the taller of the men, I am still not sure.

I do know that my own father is of short stature and that my mother’s parents intiially disproved of him because they were afraid their grandchildren would come out short, which is not true. My own father was able to compensate, and then overcompensate for his lack of height and size by being an amazing boyfriend, then husband, and finally father. His calm demeanor means that he is almost always the one who keeps the peace in the house, keeping everyone under control. We could state that if my father was not able to have such an amazing personality and capable personality, my mother would have left him for someone who was better (aka taller). I know for a fact that many of my past girlfriends who dumped or left me went on to someone who they thought was better than me, so in their mind, they were moving “up” in progress, down down. His achievements include getting a Ph. D from an ivy league school, working for a fortune 100 company, becoming a top executive, and starting at least 2 success companies of his own, and supporting his entire family of 5 alone on his salary and budget on his own while retiring only 20 years after he started working at the tender age of 34.

I guess I am making a big generalization from these two cases in saying that there is some great enduring qaulities in being short. Maybe it is because f being short that these people had to develop and strengthen other aspects of themselves to succeed in life, but that still does not take away from all of their success and personal achievements in life.

Recently I was sick and I had written an article which talked about how you can become smarter with taking Provigil or Piracetam. I had linked a few interviews that Dave Asprey had done with CNN and ABC which talked about his use of these mind enhancement drugs. Asprey runs a very popular blog on the internet called The Bulletproof Executive which teaches his readers how to hack their own bodies so make the body operate in its optimum. The blog talks a lot about nutrition, exercise, and tricks to improve our brain function.

I thought it would be appropriate to ask him about his own ideas on height, and whether height was possible as well as other ways to hack our body to perform at its best. I had gone and had emailed him with the idea of interviewing him. Well, after he had said yes now he won’t reply back to my emails so I guess I can only do the best thing. I listened through his podcasts and read through his blogs and found one podcast he did with Bill Anderews who is famous for looking for a way to reverse aging by slowing down the reate at which the telomeres at the end of our chromosomes can shorten. After the interview with Andrew on the podcast, a Q&A session took place a someone came on to ask how he could increase in size. And this is the thought of Asprey on what is currently possible.

The Podcast is Podcast #10, called “The man who would stop time”. The Link is found HERE. It is about an hour in length. I took the section of the conversation from the PDF format which you can download by clicking HERE.

The next question is from Bill. “I’m wondering if you have any insights into how an adult such
as myself, age 35, could do some biohacking to trigger body growth. I’m 5’4″ and am fascinated
by biohacking in general. I’ve been eating Brazil nuts and taking vitamin D3 to boost
testosterone. I haven’t done blood tests, but anecdotal results seem to indicate that I’m making
progress. Anyway, if I could trigger body growth, I just think that would be pretty kickass.
Thanks in advance for anything you’re got.”
Dave Asprey: Well there’s sort of two answers about body growth. I’m hoping you mean
muscle growth not height but you mentioned you’re 5’4” and you want more height. There’s
always the surgery to increase your shin bones which is incredibly destructive and you shouldn’t
do that. That’s barbaric to be honest, but I’ve seen some evidence that people can increase the
when you wake up in the morning, if you take you height, you can be about an inch taller than
you are at the end of the day just from compression in your spine. So training yourself to stand
up straighter and to have better collagen to form in your body which can take several months, I
think you might find some significant benefits there.
The best way I know to improve collagen is you need to be exercising and things like that but
you also should try the collagen stuff we have on the website. It’s hydrolyzed type 2 predigested
collagen so it absorbs into the body and it’s designed to improve joints and basically those things
between your vertebrae are joints.

The other thing, if you’re talking about muscle growth or you just want muscles to support your
spine, taking a whey protein concentrate with very high levels of IGG is a good idea. I’ve been
working for years on finding one that doesn’t cause stomach upset and one that has unusual
muscle building capabilities and I finally got the formula down where I want it and we’re
actually going to be launching something called Upgraded Whey some time on our sister site
upgradedself.com.

Armi, do you have any other thoughts on getting taller?

Armi Legge: Not really. Unfortunately that’s more genetic, the kind of 5 percent that are pretty
much set in stone. There are obviously things you could do that could hurt that like staying
stressed all the time, lack of sleep when you’re young, so I don’t have many great ideas in terms
of increasing your height once you stop growing

Me: Well, I would say that someone like Asprey here is a very knowledgeable guy and what he says agrees with a lot of what I believe. There is indeed some ways to increase our height by at least 1 inch which Asprey concurs with. However, he is aware of the current limited number of options for people who want to grow taller naturally. He states in a reply email to me that “A height hack that did more than spinal disk stretching would be epic!”

You can reach Asprey on his blog at The Bulletproof Executive or his email at

Dave Asprey| VP Cloud Security – Virtualization & Cloud Technology Evangelist

twitter.com/daveasprey  – Email: dave_asprey@trendmicro.com

Today I found a rather nice article that shows that scientists can now grow bones from using plastics. I will copy and past the entire article here.

Neo-organs: Scientists use plastics to help the body make new bone

January 15, 2001
Web posted at: 11:21 AM EST (1621 GMT)

(CNN) — Physicians tell us the human body is a marvel of engineering. It can adapt to survive in many different environments, it can build muscle to grow stronger and can even heal itself. Its major flaw is it doesn’t come with spare parts. But scientists are working on ways to address that — at least for one body part. They’re developing exciting new strategies to make new bone.By David Terraso
CNN.com Associate Editor

Imagine a day when you show up to the emergency room with a broken leg. Instead of putting your leg in a cast for an entire month or two, doctors inject the fractured site with a plastic liquid that hardens in about a week, providing enough support for you to walk on it.

But this scaffolding provides more than structural support, it actually helps your bone heal. Built into the plastic scaffold are proteins called growth factors, which are released as the plastic degrades inside your body. The proteins help entice blood vessels from the healthy surrounding bone to invade the damaged area, bringing nutrients that the new tissue needs to survive. After a while, all the plastic has safely disintegrated, leaving you with new bone where the fracture once was.

While healing a broken leg is certainly important, this technique, if perfected, could also be used to replace bone destroyed by cancer, or in a spine fusion to treat a ruptured disk. By fusing two vertebrae together, the surgeon can eliminate the pain.

Current strategies

Each year an estimated 300,000-600,000 patients have bone fractures that require doctors to augment the body’s natural healing process. Additionally, many patients have conditions in which large segments of bone are destroyed or must be removed.

Currently, if a patient needs new bone, the best way for the doctor to obtain it is to perform an autograft — to scrape the bone from another site on the patient’s body, usually the hip. Taking the bone from the patient’s own body does two things. It eliminates the possibility that the tissue will be rejected by the immune system, and the growth factor proteins and stem cells in the scraped bone help it grow into new bone as well as induce the surrounding healthy bone to grow into it.

While this technique works, it’s akin to robbing Peter to pay Paul, leaving the patient with a damaged hip. Since the scraped bone is in tiny pieces, it provides no structural support. And there’s only so much bone that can be harvested, so if a patient needs more than his hip will give him, doctors often resort to a second technique known as allografting — taking the bone from a deceased donor.

Allografting has its own problems. Because the tissue is dead, it has none of the growth inducing properties the living bone has. But it provides more structural support, because doctors use an entire section of bone from the donor, rather than just bone scrapings.

From plastics to people

The challenge facing researchers is to find a material that has the structural support of the allografts, while having the growth-inducing properties of the self-harvested autografts. The ideal material would also be able to degrade safely inside the body, leaving only newly formed bone behind.

Dr. Antonios Mikos, a chemist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and vice president of the Tissue Engineering Society, thinks he and other researchers have found that material: plastics.

“The biggest problem in engineering organs is getting the blood supply to them,” said Mikos. Plastics may offer a way to solve that problem.

Even if the doctor can get new bone to form, unless blood can get to the new tissue, it will die, leaving the patient no better off than before the operation. So the trick is to encourage cells and blood vessels that are already in the surrounding area to grow into the new bone. Loading plastics to release proteins known as growth factors could do just that.

The main advantage of using plastics is that they can be injected, eliminating the need to cut open the patient. Their weight-bearing capacity can also be adjusted, depending on their chemical make-up, to be as strong as a thighbone, or lighter and more porous, such as a jawbone.

Another big advantage of plastics, said Mikos, is that scientists can control the rate at which they degrade. Tuning these plastics to degrade at the same rate as the new bone is formed is extremely important. If they disintegrate too quickly, they lose structural support — if they don’t disappear fast enough, new bone will have trouble forming. To make matters even more difficult, the plastic will have to degrade at a different rate depending on which bone it is in and how much weight the bone has to carry, Mikos explained.

Researchers have already been using certain plastics, which already have FDA approval for specific uses inside the body. But since no single material can work for every bone, Mikos is trying to develop new kinds of plastics that will be specifically designed to work as, say, a thighbone, or a vertebra, being able to handle the proper load and degrade at the correct rate for each bone. It’s a difficult task, he admitted, but one that has great promise.

In addition to inducing surrounding cells to make bone, another strategy researchers are pursuing is seeding the plastic scaffolds with stem cells. Taken from bone marrow, stem cells have the ability to turn into many different kinds of cells depending on the environment they are in. The stem cells on the scaffold would turn into bone themselves. For patients who don’t have enough bone-growing cells in the surrounding area, such as the elderly, smokers, or patients who’ve undergone radiation therapy, seeding the scaffolds with stem cells will allow bone to grow where it otherwise would not have been able to.

“The main obstacle to the stem cell approach is in large defects, larger than half a millimeter. The cells on the interior of the scaffold tend to die because they can’t get enough nutrients from adjacent blood vessels,” said Mikos.

One solution may be to seed the plastic scaffold with both the growth factors and stem cells, but for patients such as those mentioned above, the growth factors wouldn’t work very well. It’s also unclear how much growth factor is needed in humans. The initial animal research showed the growth factor proteins work well, but as scientists test this method on species that are closer in makeup to humans, they find they have to use a lot more of these proteins, which may not be safe in these high doses. Fortunately, there is some promising research that hopes to get around this problem.

The natural solution

“Scientists have long known that exercise helps maintain and strengthen bone,” said Dr. Robert Guldberg, a biomechanical engineer at the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues.

Creating mechanical stress on the bone can help stimulate bone to repair itself. Using this idea, Guldberg is working on using a hydraulically activated implant inside the injured area to accelerate healing by putting stress on the bone defects.

“During normal function, bone is a load-bearing tissue and strategies for engineering bone regeneration must therefore consider the mechanical loading environment in the body,” Guldberg explained.

He could also use this system to force the nutrients from the surrounding cells into the interior of the defect, allowing those cells to thrive.

In keeping with his philosophy of mimicking the natural healing process, Guldberg is also growing cartilage scaffolds in the lab and implanting them into bone defects. During normal fracture healing and growth, cartilage produces growth factor proteins among other things that entice surrounding cells to make new bone. The benefit of using cartilage over plastics may be that “since it’s the natural scaffold for bone anyway, there might be a natural tuning of the scaffold degradation process with new bone formation,” said Guldberg.

Custom-fitted parts

Growing bone inside a particular defect is one thing. In some patients there is still the problem of forcing the new bone to grow into a particular shape. For a patient with cancer of the mouth, part of the jawbone sometimes needs to be removed to prevent the cancer from spreading. Replacing the diseased bone with a new one that looks and operates just like a healthy jawbone is extremely important in helping the patient resume a normal life.

Dr. Michael Miller, deputy chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, is working on using plastic molds to help grow new bone into specific shapes.

A big problem in dealing with patients who have cancer is that many of them have to undergo radiation therapy, which harms many of the bone-producing cells in the surrounding tissue, said Miller. So it’s particularly challenging to grow new bone in those areas.

To address this problem, Miller has been developing a new method based on filling plastic molds with ground up bone from autografts and placing them next to the patient’s hip. This technique accomplishes two things — the mold forces the bone to grow into a particular shape so it can be custom fitted into the defect, and since the bone is growing next to healthy tissue, it can use the undamaged cells to form blood vessels and new bone, potentially overcoming the radiation problem. So far, Miller has tested this technique in sheep with encouraging results.

Combining the fields of gene therapy and tissue engineering, some researchers are trying to induce the body to make more growth-inducing proteins. Dr. Scott Boden, a spine surgeon at Emory University who works with Guldberg, has discovered a gene that encodes for a bone-making protein called Lim Mineralization Protein. By genetically engineering cells to make more of this protein, scientists hope to encourage bone growth.

“One of the applications being tested is to relieve back pain by implanting these genetically engineered cells in between adjacent vertebrae, causing them to fuse with new bone formation,” said Guldberg.

Although there is still a lot of testing to be done before any of these techniques become part of everyday medical practice, researchers are optimistic they are on the right track.

“Since no single technique is going to work in all situations, pursuing several strategies increases our chances we’ll be able to treat the wide range of conditions that affect patients,” said Guldberg.

The day when we can grow our own spare parts may not be that far away.

While this technology can not be directly used to increase our height through just adding some of the plastic to the ends of our bones, it can be used in collaboration with others to create a height increase method. The article found from the boards is a rather old one, back from 2001. You can get to it by clicking HERE.

Note: I have to admit right now that a lot of the articles and posts I create from now will be from many of the boards and forums I visit which I have on the Resource Page. I will always link them and reference Where I got the initial idea from. If you wanted to read more on the idea, click on the links, check out the boards and read the other people’s comments. Thank you.

So here is a very interesting study done by a group of Russian scientists researchers. The Institute the researchers are affiliated with is the Cell Technology Center at Russia’s Veterinary Academy. Apparently they went into sheep’s hind legs, cut them open, and inserted a porous implant where stem cells were added. The implanted eventually dissolved into the bone and the stem cells started to turn into the tissue around it, the bone and that meant that the leg expanded from the new bone cells.

The article is posted

Sheep with model’s legs

Plastic surgery knows hardly any limits in making women as beautiful as they can afford. Even the most undistinguished clinics can provide their clients with breasts of any size and hourglass waists. However, long legs have until recently remained beyond their wildest dreams – until Russian surgeons invented a stem cell technique and tested it on sheep.

Until recently, the Ilizarov frame was the only option to lengthen or reshape limb bones, as well as to treat complex and open bone fractures. However, any woman whose self-esteem is impaired by not having legs up to her neck will soon be offered a different way. That path is not paved with roses either, but even high technology cannot cancel the old truth about beauty knowing no pain.

Specialists from the Cell Technology Center at Russia’s Veterinary Academy have completed a four-year experiment to extend bone tissue. They have tested their method on a hundred sheep, implanting in their hind leg bones a porous implant (matrix) impregnated with stem cells taken from the animal earlier. In fact a sheep’s legs have comparable structure and bear a similar load to human ones. The experiment has successfully led to the implant’s biodegradation and replacement with absolutely natural living bone tissue.

“This technique will help lengthen limb bones by up to 8 cm, and only because muscles and skin cannot be stretched further,” said project leader Alexander Teplyashin. In addition to fulfilling many women’s wildest dreams, the new technique will be widely used in disaster medicine. It will help treat survivors with problem bone fractures who would have otherwise faced limb amputation.

“It will become possible to replace the fractured part of any bone, even the skull, with a stem cell matrix,” Teplyashin said. Dr Davud Dervishov, head of the Academy’s immunology department, shares his colleague’s enthusiasm.

The project is now pending official approval of clinical tests. So hopefully, the women looking with envy at models on glossy covers won’t have to wait long.

Kommersant

Me: From the forums, it is generally concluded that this could become an alternative to the traditional limb lengthening surgical process that is available today developed by Ilizarov. There will not be any internal metal implants inside a person’s leg. The problem with this alternative method is that now the inhibiting factor is not the bone, but the muscle and tissue around it since muscle and tissue cannot stretch beyond say 8 cms in length in such a short amount of time. With the Ilizarov method, the muscles and surrounding muscles are elastic enough so they can be stretching by 1 mm each day for a long time. So far, the method is not commercially available and I suspect won’t be available for cosmetic surgery use to help short stature people for at least another 10 years. 

The articles this topic was originally taken from are HERE and HERE. For the forum discussion about this, click HERE.

So this was a new method or technique that I discovered while looking through the message boards and was mentioned quite a bit. Most people have agreed that it is a scam or that it DOESN’T work. However, I still wanted to mention it because it is something that one could look into if one was truly inclined. I would recommend that if one decides to try it to get in contact and talk with the method’s creator before trying it.

Apparently there are these people popping up that offers their services which does “Body Remodeling”. I found only 1 website that talk about this approach. So maybe it really is just one person with a method with a service. They are at www.bodyremodeling.org and their claim is that they are ” the latest technique to increase body height with body shape improvement “without surgery”. They claim to go to your house and help you grow taller since there is no actual physical clinic. For me that is okay since my company is online and mobile. I have a PO Box as the mailing address for my company.

This is from the Techniques Page

“Body Remodeling Technique” is a very recent technique, generally depending on traditional physical therapy techniques, not only to make the muscles and nerves take the desired shapes, but also it molds the bones themselves to the desired shape and volume.

Our bodies, physiologically, are continuously changing through organized and coordinated destructions and creation of different cell types: skin, blood, muscles and of course bones.
Our bodies evolve and adapt themselves according to external pressures and events. Thus and according to the nature of our professional, social, personal and hygienic lives, our body responds with what fits it to keep it healthy and insure its future.

“Body Remodeling Technique” is based on the change of the ratio of external pressures and events surrounding us, hence the targeted body segment responds gradually by changing the necessary cells to improve the shape according to the wish of the therapist. The most obvious implication for Body Remodeling would be without a doubt OVERALL BODY HEIGHT INCREASE.

Currently, multiple techniques inducing height increase do exist. The most important and most reliable technique – besides Body Remodeling – is the surgery called “the Ilizarov technique” where the leg bones are cut and the two parts are retracted daily by 1 mm with the aid of a specific machine.
Many problems might occur with the use of the surgery mainly: pain, infections, osteonecrosis and bone bending, added to many long months during which the subject must be bedridden, in addition to the high cost of this technique.

There are other techniques such as hormone therapy and drug therapy of course associated to all their side effects and unreliability.

On the other hand, the “Body Remodeling Technique” depends on 3 sections:

1. Physical Therapy:
Specific techniques and specialized equipment will aid the mild evolution of bone and muscle cells and increase its speed, under close monitoring and control.

2. Specialized Machine:
This machine is used to simulate specific external pressures and events, it is custom made to each subject, according to his or her body measurements. It helps the graduate increase of bone length with the least pain mentionable.

3. Sporting Exercises:
The exercises are necessary to insure the correct and healthy evolution of muscles and nerves in parallel with the increase of bones length during the treatment.

The results obtained by this “Body Remodeling Technique” are more than satisfactory, where the candidates gained an average height increase of 1.5cm (more than ½ inches) per month with no specific limits.

In addition, there are no limits regarding the age or gender of the persons that can benefit from this technique, keeping in mind that physiologically, there are 4 variables that influence the monthly increase average: age, gender, weight, and bone type.

From a biological and physiological point of view, everything they stated is true but I can not say that what they offer really works. The claim is that the average height gain is 1.5 cm per month. Now if this thing works, that would be mighty impressive. .

This is from the FAQ page

4. What is your technique and how it works?

This remodeling technique is called Non-Invasive Bone Distraction divided in two parts:

a. the machine

It is custom made; this means that every subject has his own machine, which he or she takes home with them. It is a complicated and secret mechanic system. It looks like a cervical collar, you know the sponge collar; it is also worn the same easy way. Every segment of the legs has its own machine, so for lengthening the legs a person would need 4 parts each one for a different segment 2 for the thighs and 2 for the legs. These machines permit full range of motion of the lower limbs joints, so it is possible to wear them under the clothes at home but they a little bit unestethic to go out wearing them. So by strapping this machine for at least 6 hours a day preferably 8 hours, and most specially during sleep. They help the bone grow taller. There is no pain and no irritating discomfort especially when the subject is used to the machine. But the machine in itself can do nothing without the physical therapy.

b. Physical therapy

In the beginning, the treatment consists of 3 sessions per week where different P.T. techniques are done to help the bone react to the machine. Then this number of sessions will be reduced, up to the time where the wanted height is achieved then the machine must still be worn but the P.T. techniques are stopped permitting the bone to stop remodeling. We should mention that the subject must follow a rigid muscle stretching and strengthening in parallel usually for 1 hour a day (1/2 in the morning and ½ in the evening). Naturally there are some advises that will be given before and during the treatment about nutrition, health and other subjects.

Me: There is a lot more in explanation you can find from the FAQs section HERE. From What I can see, the machine appears to be some form of rough padding that one wears. They say one can get 4-6 inches on average after many months or a year, I am not entirely sure. I would have to say that the site is very informative. After looking through the website, I looked around the internet on what others have said about this new method or product. This is taken from the great resource and blog Quest For Height written in June 2010 By Tyler Christopher Davis.

Body Remodeling Review – Tuesday, June 15, 2010

I have been in contact through exchanging emails with a person named Harald Oberlaender in the last few days who had started the Organization Biomedical Growth Research Initiative. On a previous post, I had stated the organization was most likely a scam since it had an address which was a PO Box in Israel while Harald was from Germany. From the very first page on the website here the person was asking for a donation for the project HERE.  Apparently this project has been going on for 9 years now, 5 years since he posted on the Make Me Taller boards and he still hasn’t been able to get the funding of around say 300,000 to begin the first part of animal testing.

So far I have decided to retract that statement of the organization being a scam and wait to see if Harald will sent me the idea proposals so I can see that the initiative has a real intent. I have signed a NDA and will not go into the specifics but will only state whether the ideas the researchers created are even viable. I do have a degree very close to Biomedical Engineering and the Chemical Sciences. In the internet space, one has to have a very good Bullshit Radar.

From a financial and investment point of view, I understand the challenges he faces. I guess there was a few interested investors but no one was willing to put their money where their mouth was. Speaking from experience from what I know about VCs (Venture Capitalist) and Angel Investors, it really is VERY difficult to get money from them. Often before people are willing to put money in, they want both 1. Some proof of concept through a physical product and 2. Evidence that other people have invested.

Since the project is only on paper and has no actual physical manifestation, investors are unsure if the idea even works. Plus, there has been not one person who has given money yet, so clearly no one is going to be the first to step up. Usually the first investor who puts their hand in the pot is the one who loses. If one has ever worked for any length of time in the financial sector, say investment consultant, they would know the horrible numbers that biotechnology companies have. Very few ever survive long enough to get their product approved and out to market. Most run out of money because they did not realize how long of a “runway” they need for the venture.

So, I am sitting here waiting for Harald’s reply email with the papers so I can look over them.