Heightism is Not a Social Construct but an Irrepressible Bias Based on Natural Instinct

I am probably going to be tarred and feather for this claim by certain people but I will make just one claim which is this, the socio-anthropological term “heightism” is not a social construct but an irrepressible bias based on natural instinct.

This claim I am making would go directly against many people who might be below average in height of the overall group that they are in. To defend their own self image of their worth as a human being, they would obviously reject that concept and counterclaim that heightism is a social construct.

I was recently looking at the website traffic that is coming to this website and noticed that a few Reddit threads were linking back to this website. It seems that some people in the Short category were using a few older posts to validate some point they were trying to make about the science of height and growth. It is something that is created by the individuals of a specific culture to be biased against and ridicule the shorter individuals of the society, most specifically the male members. I had to disagree. (The thread was titled “Heightism and Height Scams“)

One person who commented made the exact quote that heightism is a social construct. That person calls himself Goefrrey. Only recently did I found out about the 1000+ post tumbler website started by a him (Geoffrey Arnold). He wrote two short pieces called “Is Height Discrimination Natural?” and “Heightism is a Social Construct based in Gender Norms”

Why I think Heightism is an Unconscious Natural Instinct

If heightism was indeed some type of social construct, wouldn’t it then be a social phenomena that is prevalent in only certain countries and cultures. So far I have not met one single culture or society which had the opposite opinion, which is that the smaller percentage people of a society is better looking. Can you name one culture that does that?

If 99% of the people in a culture believes in something, doesn’t that sort of imply that it might be real? Of course, we could counter that argument with the curious case of North Korea. It is believed that maybe 98-99% of all the people in North Korea believes that Kim Il Sung is a real god and their national hero which they go crazy for. If 99% of the people in that small nation and society believes that he is (or was) a type of deity, does that mean that he is a god? They have no connection to the other countries outside of it. They don’t know better. Based on lack of knowledge which is the result of bad luck in the genetic lottery for being born in the country of North Korea and its regime in the last 60 years, the political state and the person desires of one despotic dictator might have the power to override even some basic natural laws. Maybe the late Kim Jong Il might have some ability to remove the thinking of almost everyone in his society. Maybe at some point due to his own inferior complex of short height, he made some crazy decree that smaller height people (around his height of probably 5′ 2″ ) was the best height. To align the malnutrition problem and stunted growth problem with national pride, he just might have the ability to convert the majority’s peoples mind to believe that being shorter is better than being taller.

We are aware of the other Communist Regimen, of the People’s Republic of China. For about 10-20 years during national zealot on the need to establish equality for all people, there was a time when being too tall was considered a bad thing. If you were taller than your peers, it was an indication that maybe you were trying to show off to other people even when you are not trying to. Based on communist principles of requiring everyone to be more or less equal, naturally growing up taller would have been frowned upon.

Then again, I think at this point we can say that the natural tendency of human beings is to shift towards capitalist societies, not communist societies. Throughout history, there has always been inequality of some form or another. The most blatant example of inequality is economic inequality. Over time, there will always be a few people in the minority which have the right combination of intelligence, drive, worth ethic, and luck to push them to the higher echelon of their respective societies.

Due to the way that human societies over time are almost guaranteed to drift into a society of divided classes with capitalism working its invisible hand (as stated by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations book), and also based on the human will to strive, succeed, and become greedy, as well as to hoard their wealth and not wanting to share the wealth they had accumulated over the years of hard work with other people who chose not to put in as much effort or was lazy, it would make sense that the communistic ideal would never work. It is unnatural.

Only communist societies would ever try to negate and reprogram a human to believe that taller is not better. Of course we have sort of proved based on the negative, non-altruistic tendencies in the dark recesses of the human psyche, that communism can never work in the long run since they run counter to what we are naturally responsive to. That means that left on its own to make up its own judgements and thoughts about how the world and nature works, the human mind to go back to its default embedded programming from over million years of evolution, the majority of every society will believe that being taller is better than being shorter (if of course you manage to hold all the other factors and parameter in the system you are analyzing constant)

The Case Based on The Distribution & Prevalence of Heightism

Heightism is more than just an American (USA), Canadian, Australian, or European social convention. In my own travels throughout the Western Modern world and then traveling to the countries to the East, Asia, Japan, South Korea, and China, every single nation and culture seems to prize tall stature and believe that taller people are better looking. Give a survey to 100 young females on what the height standard they would want in a male partner and probably 90-95% of them would want the male companion to be in the taller group from simple classifications and categorizations.

I have written at least 3-4 post before showing just how much effort people of these East Asian countries are putting to make themselves taller or trying to make their own children slightly taller. We might be tempted to ask whether something like height is something worth putting so much of their mental energy and effort. We could argue that unlike suffering some type of medical disorder which might inflict great pain through the body, being not as tall we other people would not cause any type of real physical pain to the individual.

Based on the competitiveness of the world, and how many people are in this world, it is almost a sort of given that people are going to want to express their own individuality and uniqueness by comparing themselves to others to find something about themselves which sets them apart from others in a positive way. One of the easiest ways to show that one is (supposedly) intrinsically better than another person is comparing whose top of the head is further away from the level ground which they both stand on. Remember that no matter where we go on this planet, there is a downward force called gravity pushing every single cell in our body downwards. Our measured height is a way for the individual organism to pronounce their rejection in being pushed down into the dirt/ground by this most fundamental of universal forces.

It might be argued that the anthropometric measurement is sort of arbitrary and that measuring the top of one’s head (or cranial bone) to the feet is a very strange human derived concept. Maybe height is just a word we use to describe a measurement that doesn’t really translate into any type of real benefit for any average person living their life. If both of the people use the same measuring stick or standard, then a comparison of two human beings can be done. However, we have seen already that stunted growth is a result of some illness or disorder. Whereas there are hundreds of different types of diseases that can cause the person to become shorter and develop stunted growth, there is a very few diseases that makes a person become taller than average or develop an accelerated rate of growth. Most anthropologists with ecologists have agreed that the best indicator of a country’s overall health is from looking at their average height. Apparently the height of a country is a very good indicator on the overall health of the people living there. This shows that increased height does have a real correlation to an increase in the increase of the quality of life, as least for a nation overall. The people living in Sweden have a better quality of life than the people of say China and is obvious from looking at the height differences in the two countries.

We as a species realize that a lot of our emotional and mental energy and suffering is caused from constantly comparing ourselves to other people. Being tall or rich or beautiful is a concept that is based on relativity. Being 6 feet tall in India is big but in Norway it is just average. Making $100,000 a year in the Philippines makes you rich but to do that in Singapore makes you vey average. However, we hope that the reader understands the principle of relativity. The unique way that people judge their own place in the world is not based on absolute standards, but relative standards which can change (increase and decrease) over time.

This is not just some type of American and East Asian phenomena. The largest demographic to this website is from the countries of India and Philippines. I get bombarded by messages everyday from hundreds of young Indian and Filipino teenagers asking me how to help become taller. One of the most popular posts I have ever written which has gotten the most comments and shares was the review on the Gloxi Height Enhancer Drink (Read the review here). Gloxi has been something that has been advertised on TV in the Philippines as a height increase drink for years but the local Filipinos don’t realize that the drink is made in Taiwan. I found it absolutely despicable that people of one Asian countries would manufacture an obviously useless drink to another Asian country to take advantage of their ethnic features. Probably some guy in East Asia realized that the people in Southeast Asia were of a shorter height than them and were not internet savy yet so they used the people’s ignorance of science to get them to buy strange drinks which promises a dream which can never come true. It seems that this belief in tall stature being better is a social phenomena that is experience throughout the entire continent of Asia.

So what about africa? I am reminded of the genocide that happened in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis. It seems that the two different groups of ethnicities which lived in the same geopolitical state which we call a country or nation were of a bipolar distribution of heights. The Hutus were the majority and the Tutsi were the minority. They spoke the same language and lived next to each other. The only difference were in the body sizes. From the BBC News article I quote the following “…Tutsis are often taller and thinner than Hutus, with some saying their origins lie in Ethiopia”. Apparently when the Belgians first came over for colonialism, they decided to classify the ethnic tribes. By some default reasons, they just decided to say that the Tutsis were the better of the two ethnicities, with no real reason except that they were taller in body size. Obviously that Tutsis were happy with it and they got many different economic privileges for decades until the Hutus became very resentful of the differences. The picture to the right was found from the blog post “The Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s and Belgium Stereotyping“. It seems that even in Africa the belief in taller people being somehow better is also present, although we are fully aware that it was the Belgians who were the original judges on which tribes were deemed by default to be better or more attractive.

How about South America? Again, let’s look at the viewpoints of the natives which lived there before outside influences. The most obvious example is of the legendary white-skinned cloud people called the Chachapoyas. (source). For centuries these people were neighbors to the Incans and the Incans admired them for their tall stature and light skin color.

Quoted below…

“The women of the Chachapoya were much prized by the Incas as they were tall and fair skinned. The Chronicler Pedro Cieza de León offers wrote of the Chachapoyas. “They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in Indies, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.”

While I am not going to debate where humans also have some type of natural affinity for lighter skin color and have always thought that lighter skin is more attractive (That is a discussion for other types of websites), I have no doubt that the feature of being of tall stature of this particular tribe in the native South America is something that that shorter Incans admired greatly. So even in native tribes in South American before any type of European Influence, the local also thought that tall stature is something that is admired.

My Main Point

This bias or unconscious preference to project a more positive image on taller people in 99.9% of all cultures and societies in the world shows that that it is NOT something that was programmed into us by our parents or teachers in grade school.

I don’t think we can un-program or overwrite this type of programming, because it is part of our reptilian brain system. It is unconscious, it is natural, it is something that would be extremely hard to reprogram. I liken this situation to the metaphor of computer software and hardware. Whereas culture is like the software which you can change and rewrite by changing source code of a program, the hardware is something you can’t do without taking a manual, hands on approach through real manipulation using mechanical manipulation. If we treat the brain as the computer, then the software is the ideas, believes, and values in a person. We can over time change that part. The actual anatomy and physiology of the brain is the hardware. There is no way that we can use software (ie hypnosis) to change the hardware. We can change the location of the medulla using positive affirmations. To change the actual brain, you would need surgery tools to cut and saw before moving the physical parts and components around.

Obviously, this preference may be based on natural laws, but it is not a real law as defined by science. In Science actually there is almost no “Laws” per se, but theories. Just like Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Newton’s Theory of Gravity and Eintein’s Theory of Relativity, it is very hard for scientists to claim anything to be a real law. Off of the top of my head, I know of only two real scientific laws, which are actually related to each other. They are the 1st law of thermodynamics, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The first law states that energy can never be lost or increase, but only changed between different types. The second one says that the entropy or disorder in a the examined system will only increase over time. Those are laws. This claim I make is that the height preference is a natural law, like the natural law of sexuality. If you were going to make a bet, 95-99%% of the time, you would be right about going with the taller person since everyone else would agree based on some natural instinctual embedded programming.

Analogously, we can say that this natural law for humans to almost always lean towards the taller people in any group is a very good rule of thumb which is similar to sexuality. You are not going to have a society which is 100% heterosexual. There is always going to be a minority of people who are homosexual, which can not be changed but based on rules of statistical probability. Straight people however will always make up the majority of a culture, around 95% or face extinction from a lack of mating and reproduction. Similarly, we can say the same thing about people’s preferences towards stature. Maybe there might be 2-4% of any society which actually prefers shorter statured individuals, but the majority, and a very large majority of the people will always choose the individuals in the group which are taller than average.

The best example is using height or size to talk about different types of living beings. Centuries ago the Greeks would describe their gods as being of immense sizes. Beyond the greek gods, there were Titans. Titans were of gigantic sizes and because of their size alone, they were given through mental projection immense strength, with so much power that they could compete with the gods.

Humans do not create gods to worship who are described as 6 inch tall dolls. When we talk about greater and more powerful beings, we almost always say that they are of immense height and size. We unconscious give the gods we make up in our head great height and size so that we can worship them. Would we really bow down to a god which appeared and was 6 inches tall? Would we still be afraid of an extraterrestrial species after first contact if they turned out to be just 2 feet in height?

Size is not everything, but it does mean a lot. For most humans size did mean a whole lot. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and say that heightism is a social construct. It is not.

I have still not found one society which believes that the shorter individuals are better than the taller ones.

The following excerpts I have italicized to indicate that they are quotes from other people on the thread board. (The other thread the following lines are taken from are at “MMT leg lengthening forum admin Apotheosis exposed and caught deceiving forum members…“)

“…All the more to me because I’ve decided on the surgery. Now this is something I can’t believe. I seem to have lost trust in humanity. The humanity that made me feel inferior because I’m short, the humanity that tries to take advantage of that in so base a way…”

“…western society as it stand right now just doesn’t like short men. We can argue until we are blue in the face about confidence and having a great self image and improving what we can change but it doesn’t stop the stigma thats going to be there. Of course this doesn’t mean you crawl into a hole and die…”

“…The problem is completely social…”

If I was to try to summarize all these thoughts that they are putting down, what these person are trying to say is sort of this type of mental viewpoint on the world.

“…the world is out to get me. In some way, maybe over the centuries of selective indoctrination of the country/culture I was born/grew up into, most of the people in my group/society have made up some type of institutionalized bias against me and people of my kind and they are all in some way (maybe not knowingly) working to put me down so that I would crater to the social pressure and develop a bad self image of myself…. Well I am going to be stubborn and resist it since I know that I am at least smarter than them. They are stupid and ignorant, I am not”.

So they make everything about themselves, and how they are being punished and being short changed in the world. They talk about how unfair it is that they have been inflicted with some type of feature that they have no control over and can’t do anything about.

Maybe also in the back of their mind somewhere they think that because they had a very tough and mentally scarring childhood from school bullies and being lonely with no friends or lack of relationship experience, they have somehow “had it worse” than other people. Because of their increased exposure to pain and suffering, that somehow automatically translates to mean that they are somehow a tougher person or stronger person than another person who didn’t have to go through what they had to go through. They think that the world is out to get them.

The truth is that most people are NOT out to get them just because they might be shorter than average. Only a small minority of people in the world ever care enough to even say hi, much less make the effort to do something to you. The truth is that most people just don’t care about the individual, or the phenomena a person might be so passionate about.

I remember a very revealing lengthy poetic quote along the lines of …

“When I was younger I was always worried about what other people thought about me.
When I got older I decided to do my own thing and stopped caring about what other people thought about me.
Now that I am close to the end of my life, I finally realize now that all that time, nobody was thinking about me. They were too busy thinking about about themselves. They were worrying about what other people thought about them”

The 2nd thing that we need to do is to accept the way that the world, the universe, nature, reality, or existence really operate. Most of us are fully aware that the world is not flat and that the Earth is NOT at the center of the universe. We are not special or our species is not that species. We can no longer stay ignorant because we have already drank from the cup of knowledge. We can;t go back and pretend that we can make up childhood stories and fantasies on how we wish the world would operate. It just doesn’t happen that way.

Instead of writing 10,000+ word discussion post on online threads on Reddit and support groups discussing the philosophical, social, or psychological ramifications of what it means to be shorter than average in one’s society, let’s just swallow this hard pill and do something else with our lives.

Instead of venting, and complaining about how the world is unfair and forcing you to play this game we call life at some obvious disadvantage, we should just take action and try to do something about it. You can save your money to get limb lengthening surgery to make yourselves 3-4 inches taller. If you want 2 feet of increased height, then go in for 5 consecutive surgeries. Those things will hurt a lot and take about 1 year each to do as well as $50-$100,000 each but I know plenty of people who became millionaires in their early 20s and retired. There are people who are short, but they have the resources to change their bodies if they really wanted it bad enough. If you wanted something bad enough, even to become taller, you can get it. You just have to be willing to pay the price for achieving your intended goals. It is just that for our specific purposes, the price we have to pay even for 2-3 inches of extra height can be quite high.

I decided to take a full year and a half out of my life to try to do something about it. This website is my work and effort in creating a resource for people to read and give them a real, decent in finding some type of solution. Sure, maybe at the very end of all of our research and studies we find NOTHING, but that is sort of like life. In the end we all have to die and be pushed in the nothingness and complete emptiness of death eventually. Eventually all of our efforts and work is in vain. We are lost in time and history as people generations from now forget who we were and our gravestone is covered over to make construction for new buildings. In the time we do have on this planet and living this life, let’s try to do something cool.

The video below is the famous speech that Rocky gave to his son in the 6th Rocky movie.

The Issue Over Cognitive Dissonance, Self Rationalization, and Ego Protection

I don’t know anyone who has not let their ego become their master the majority of the time. Our ego is what we are often protecting when we get into any type of argument or fight with another person. I say that we should stop with protecting our ego and just stop fighting the way that the world really works. We can try to write another 10,000 posts trying to argue our point, but that is not going to change anyone’s mind. The best we could do is that maybe after they finish reading our posts, they take 2-3 minutes to stop doing what they intended to do and just think about the implications of what we said.

What I would ask everyone to do is just stop bullshitting themselves, drop the ego for just this once, and just look at the world as it really is. We need to stop all the mental masturbation being done on threads on internet forums. We need to stop trying to use cognitive dissonance and justifications and rationalizations to protect our egos. Accept that height is important, and sometimes that is all that is needed.

Dr. Shahab Mahboubian Interview With Huffington Post

This was a video which I managed to find which the Huffington Post’s Nancy Redd did with Dr. Shahab Mahboubian and the former limb lengthening patient Akash Shukla. The video was originally uploaded to the website at http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/limb-lengthening-surgery/51814a4902a76036410000ba.

Dr. Shahab Mahboubian is probably the most well known limb lengthening orthopedic surgeon in California, at least for the people who are searching online for that specific type of cosmetic surgeon. Both the online forums Make Me Taller and Limb Lengthening Forum has mainly positive things to say about him and his professional skills. We are sure that there are probably a few hundred other orthopedic surgeons just in the Southern California region who can perform the same type of bone remodeling surgery but he is the one who has been promoting, advertising, and marketing himself to the online market the most and get his name out there.

Akash Shukla is one of the most well known limb lengthening surgery advocates and spokesmen. Whereas most people who get the surgery like to become private and completely anonymous about what they did like the Australian Politician Hajnal Ban, he is one of the very few who is fully comfortable in admitting this part of his life. Both people wrote a book about their experiences. Hajnal wrote the book “God Made Me Small, Surgery Made Me Tall” under the Pseudonym Sara Vornamen. He wrote his tale in “Measure of a Man“.

LSJL and the Brain: New LSJL study

This study has to do with the brain but it has to do with loading effects and is done by Hiroki Yokota one of the LSJL scientists. The study shows that in some cases LSJL may upregulate Sim1 which does have an effect on height. However, it’s usually Sim1 deficiency that increases height(but also obesity).

The intent of the study seems to be establishing that Lateral Synovial Joint Loading can be used on sedentary individuals who can’t do other forms of exercise can do this exercise to help prevent various mental problems. Since LSJL decreases Nerve Growth Factor-Beta(which is involved in pain perception) and increases Serotonin it could induce a feeling of euphoria or well-being. I have noted this myself when performing LSJL. Treadmill exercise was compared as well which has bounds of anecdotal evidence of not being able to increase height so tph2 is not likely able to increase height as an adult.

If LSJL upregulates genes that are negative for growth such as Sim1 and NGF-Beta(even if these genes are not very directly related to the processes key to growth plate chondrogenesis), maybe this could indicate that other genes related to growth are regulated in the wrong direction at this load level too. Although the LSJL lengthening study did take place at similar loads. It could indicate that the loads used were not sufficient enough. And the loads need to be such that NGF-Beta is upregulated and Sim1 is downregulated however these two genes could just be tangentially related to longitudinal bone growth and their regulation is independent of LSJL’s lengthening effects.

Physical weight loading induces expression of tryptophan hydroxylase 2 in the brain stem.

“Knee loading, a form of physical activity, has been found to mimic effects of voluntary exercise. Focusing on serotonergic signaling, we addressed a question: Does local mechanical loading to the skeleton elevate expression of tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (tph2) that is a rate-limiting enzyme for brain serotonin? A 5 min knee loading{applied laterally so this is an LSJL study} was applied to mice using 1 N force at 5 Hz for 1,500 cycles. A 5-min treadmill running was used as an exercise (positive) control, and a 90-min tail suspension was used as a stress (negative) control. Expression of tph2 was determined 30 min – 2 h in three brain regions –frontal cortex (FC), ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH), and brain stem (BS). We demonstrated for the first time that knee loading and treadmill exercise upregulated the mRNA level of tph2 in the BS, while tail suspension downregulated it. The protein level of tph2 in the BS was also upregulated by knee loading and downregulated by tail suspension. Furthermore, the downregulation of tph2 mRNA by tail suspension can be partially suppressed by pre-application of knee loading. The expression of tph2 in the FC and VMH was not significantly altered with knee loading. In this study we provided evidence that peripheral mechanical loading can activate central tph2 expression, suggesting that physical cues may mediate tph2-cathalyzed serotonergic signaling in the brain.”

“C57/BL/6 male and female mice, 6 to 8 weeks of age”

“The loaded tissue [under LSJL] is significantly softer and more energy dissipative than bone matrix in the femur and tibia.”

“In response to a 1 N force applied at 5 Hz to the mouse knee, the phase shift angle between the force and resulting displacement was found to be 18.1°. The energy loss per cycle was calculated to be 0.201 mJ, and the Young’s modulus of the knee joint was determined as 166 MPa”

“Cyclic compression was applied to the mouse left knee using an electro-mechanical loading device (ElectroForce® 3100, Bose Corporation, Eden Prairie, MN).”<-Electroforce is available for sale here. The other versions ie. 3200 are even more expensive but can apply heavier loads. I’m not sure how viable it is to apply this to the knee and there’s no price so it’s probably incredibly expensive.

“Knee loading and treadmill exercise induced significant upregulation of type I collagen mRNA in the femur and tibia, as well as type II collagen mRNA in cartilage. Furthermore, unloading through tail suspension for 90 min led to significant reduction of type II collagen in cartilage. However, unloading did not present significant change in type I collagen mRNA as compared to the untreated controls. Although not significant, knee loading at 1 N showed a decreasing trend of NGFß in the femur and cartilage as compared to the control”

Knee loading not increasing Type II collagen expression in the femur and tibia bone is inconsistent with the LSJL gene expression study.

In fact Treadmill exercise had a stronger impact on type II collagen than LSJL did. I emailed Hiroki Yokota and he says he believed the removed all the cartilage from the bone in this study including growth plate cartilage. It’s possible that this removal of cartilage also removed other regions of the bone that would normally express type II collagen. Ideally we would want to see expression of type II collagen in other regions of bone other than the growth plate cartilage as that would be a clear sign of ectopic chondrocyte differentiation.

In this study, the mRNA at an unclear timepoint post loading in contrast to 1 hour following loading as done in the LSJL gene expression study. It’s possible that Col2a1 was upregulated 1 hour following loading but returned to normal at some period post loading. There are some pathways that are upregulated 1 hour post loading. For example, plasma discharge treatment only elevates some factors one hour post treatment. And enhanced phosphorylation of JNK can return to baseline at one hour in some cases. Also, the LSJL gene expression study involved microarray data and this involve RT-PCR.

” Among two known upstream transcription factors, mRNA expression of Sim1 in the BS of mice treated with knee loading was significantly increased as compared to that of the sham loaded controls.”<-Does Sim1 have any effect on height?

According to Rare variants in single-minded 1 (SIM1) are associated with severe obesity., Sim1 mainly relates to energy homeostasis.

“Final height in SIM1-deficient adults was not increased. The lack of accelerated linear growth in patients with SIM1 mutations contrasts with the phenotype of [one] patient and the phenotype of Sim1 heterozygous mice. This difference may be explained by partial versus complete loss of SIM1 activity. ” Height was less than versus control obese subjects. Height was increased in MC4R deficient subjects.

“accelerated linear growth and increased final height seen in MC4R deficiency”

Here’s the study dealing with the patient mentioned:

Profound obesity associated with a balanced translocation that disrupts the SIM1 gene.

“We have studied a unique girl with early-onset obesity and a de novo balanced translocation between chromosomes 1p22.1 and 6q16.2. Her weight gain is most likely due to excessive food intake, since measured energy expenditure was normal. We cloned and sequenced both translocation breakpoints. The translocation does not appear to affect any transcription unit on 1p, but it disrupts the SIM1 gene on 6q. SIM1 encodes a human homolog of Drosophila Sim (Single-minded), a transcription factor involved in midline neurogenesis, and is a prototypical member of the bHLH-PAS (basic helix-loop-helix + period, aryl hydrocarbon receptor, Single-minded) gene family. Our subject’s trans- location separates the 5′ promoter region and bHLH domain from the 3′ PAS and putative transcriptional regulation domains. The transcriptional targets of SIM1 are not known. Mouse Sim1 is expressed in the developing kidney and central nervous system, and is essential for formation of the supraoptic and paraventricular (PVN) nuclei of the hypothalamus. Previous neuroanatomical and pharmacological studies have implicated the PVN in the regulation of body weight: PVN neurons express the melanocortin 4 receptor and appear to be physiological targets of alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone, which inhibits food intake. We hypothesize that haploinsufficiency of SIM1, possibly acting upstream or downstream of the melanocortin 4 receptor in the PVN, is responsible for severe obesity in our subject.”

“The proband (SW116) was referred to a pediatric geneticist at age 18 months because of excessive growth.”

“We identified a mutation in the SIM1 gene in a girl with profound obesity and increased linear growth.”<-they suspect the mutation was SIM1 haploinsufficiency.

Back to the LSJL study:

“Knee loading led to increases of transcription factor, Sim 1 and Pet 1 mRNA but not REST/NRSF in the BS”

” Other target genes of Sim1, lhx8 and RGS4 did not show significant alteration with knee loading applied in the present study. However, we did find the upregulation of lhx8 and RGS4 mRNA in the BS (hindbrain) as compared to the VMH (midbrain)”

“load-driven upregulation of tph2 mRNA persisted at least 2 h”

“In this study, we showed the effect of peripheral mechanical loading on the brain. The observed remote effect can potentially be mediated through central projecting stimulation and neuronal signaling with neurotrophins. For instance, NGFß is a member of the neurotrophins that is involved in pain sensation and survival of neuron in the brain. Alternatively, loading can be sensed through alterations in the level of hormones and growth factors in the serum. Through signaling molecules in blood circulation, gene expression in the BS might be regulated. Knee loading induces direct loading effects, including formation of new bone, stimulation of fracture healing, prevention of cartilage degeneration, and suppression of pain in the knee. Knee loading can modulate brain serotonin level through tph2 in the BS.”<-Here’s the study that shows that LSJL decreases NGF-Beta. Serotonin may have an effect on height via LRP5. Although the exact effect of LRP5 on height is unclear.

Review of Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. Dong Hoon Lee For Limb Lengthening Surgery

Before we start on this post, I did want to completely admit a few things for the readers of the website.

I am currently living in the country of South Korea. The exact location where I am actually living at is about 5 minute walk from the Gangnam Station in the Gangnam area of Seoul.
One of the reasons I came to Korea besides for a business opportunity was to take a look at the medical tourism opportunities. I went in for a consultation to the famous BK Hospital located in the Nonhyeon-Dong area about over a year ago to get a possible nose reduction and eyelift (I have rather baggy eyes)
In the last 3 months I have taken my Korean girlfriend to the Severance Hospital (associated with Yonsei University) in Gangnam about 10 times or so because of certain medical issues she has had to deal with. We were referred to the Severance Hospital by a neurologist.

What I am trying to state right away is that because of my very unique situation, due to the exact location of where I have lived for almost a year and a half now, from the very beginning of the website, I have had a much more lenient approach and view on cosmetic surgery than most of my friends back in the US or Canada. Remember also that I am an American and a guy. What this means that my viewpoint on the use of cosmetic surgery to “improve” or “remodel” one’s physical appearance is positive.

I have known for a very long time that the Gangnam area, specifically the Apgujeong Dong area is filled with Plastic Surgery clinics by the hundreds. Every single day I am reminded over and over again of people who have gone under the knife, and let surgeons break their bones to make themselves more beautiful. They have chosen to endure maybe a 1 month of excruciating pain for a possible 30 years of benefits for improving their physical appearance ever so slightly. The fact that every single time I turn on the TV or go to the movies and the ads and previews are filled with commercials for cosmetic surgery clinics show just how pervasive it is in this part of the world.

The video below from Simon and Martina of the Eat Your Kimchi blog might be worth checking out to understand the South Korean psyche and thinking process on why they feel that changing one’s appearance through surgery is okay.

At this point, due to what I have seen on a daily basis, and based on my own life story, I completely and fully accept the idea of using cosmetic surgery to make a person more beautiful, whether it is to make them taller by breaking their leg bones in half, or to cut the jaw bones to give the face a more V-like shape.

So let’s take a look at what is probably the only well known South Korean physician or surgeon which advertises this controversial cosmetic surgery procedure to the international community.

His name is Dr. Dong Hoon Lee (or Dr. Donghoon Lee)

I first became away of Dr. Dong Hoon Lee from scouring through the old journals written by people on the Make Me Taller discussion forum which were used to document/log their personal journey. When it came to doctors in this country of 50 millions, he was the only one that was really blatantly promoting, marketing, and advertising his services.

Dr. Lee would again be mentioned in the newer Limb Lengthening Forum in a thread entitled “Dr Donghoon Lee (Gyeonggi-do, South Korea) Bundang CHA Hospital”. The pricing listed on the forum thread is…

LON (Lengthening Over Nail) = $40,000
LATN (Lengthening And Then Nailing) = $46,000
PRECICE (Femur) (Intramedullary Lengthening Devices) = $64,000
PRECICE (Tibia) = $65,000
Nail Removal = $5,000

This is his official website Here. It seems that in a post made just a few days ago, on Jan 8th, 2014 Dr. Lee’s Assistant sent an email to one of the board members on the new discussion forum noting to them that Dr. Lee has relocated to become part of the medical staff at Yonsei Severance Hospital. Refer to the thread “Dr. Donghoon Lee Moving to Severance Hospital in Seoul, Korea“

Quoted from him on the forum…

“As I begin my new post as a Limb Lengthening Professor at Severance, I will do my best to make Severance one of the leading hospitals for Limb Lengthening and Deformity correction in the world.
…Above all else, I will be the only one in charge of limb lengthening surgeries at the Severance hospital, so I will certainly have increased responsibilities and a lot of expectations to live up to.”

Contact Information

Email: assistdong@naver.com & orthopaedee@naver.com
Bundang CHA Hospital Address: 351, Yatap-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea (Zip Code: 463-712)
Bundang CHA Hospital Central Reservation Number: (+82) 1577-4488

Note: The contact information above is his old clinic address. The Severance Hospital he will be relocating to beginning in the March of 2014 will be in Sinchon- Dong. Click Here for the Wikipedia article on it. The Severance Hospital I’ve been going to is in the Gang-nam area. They are two different hospitals with the same name, but are in two different locations in Seoul.

Our Review

One of the things we look for in a really good surgeon to make us taller is to look for a type of transparency in their practices. From his personal website DrDongHoon.com we feel that Dr. Lee is being very transparent in his practices. When we reviewed Dr. Paley and Dr. Sarin before in posts about a year ago we were not this thorough in our analysis.

What is interesting is that there is no height limit at which he is setting, unlike most North American doctors in the West. Dr. Dror Paley has stated in a few interviews that he almost always rejects males who are already over 1.80 meters in height (or 5′ 11″) from getting the surgery because they are more likely to be suffering from body dysmorphic disorder. Dr. Lee seems to have no objection on doing the surgery on anyone who desires it, as long as they are healthy enough to go through the rehabilitation process.

He states that the surgery is for people to gain some sort of self-satisfaction, not to fix a medical disability.

For a 1st time consultation it would cost about $330. There is no insurance that would cover this type of surgery, since it is cosmetic in nature and not really of a medical concern. So far he has done about 400 or so bilateral leg lengthenings.

Something which Dr. Lee has revealed for an interview on the Make Me Taller forums was to show that while there is no limit to how much length is possible for the bones to grow, there is a limit due to the soft tissue aka muscles around the bones. While you can stretch the bones to be even even a feet longer, the muscles around the bone can only stretched out so long before they snap from having too high of a tensile load.

What we were sort of surprised with was that the interview with Dr. Lee was also posted on the MMT Forums just yesterday (Jan 15th, 2014). It seems that he is finally getting a lot of coverage from all of the major English based websites on the internet.

Personal Background on Dr. Lee

(from his professional website www.BowLegsKnockKneesLegLengthening.com)

Entered Yonsei University Medical School in 1991
Completed training in orthopedics at Severance Hospital
Became a specialist in 2001
Two-year fellowship under the guidance of Professor Chang-Dong Han from Severance Hospital
part of an Iraq dispatch troop that was stationed in Nasiriya (Operation Iraq Freedom) and served at the Korean Armed Forces Capital Hospital – 9th Airborne Brigade Chief of medicine & Iraq Korean Army medical support committee Chief of medicine
Appointed as an Assistant Professor at Bundang CHA Hospital
study under Dr. Paley around 2010
Completed Baltimore Limb Deformity Course (Sinal Hospital, Baltimore, USA) -2009,2010
Completed ISKD training course (Universitatsklinikum Munster, Germany)
Paley Advanced Limb Lengthening Institute – Clinical Fellowship

Side Note: Technically there is also another Dr. Donghoon Lee in the University of Washington’s School of Medicine Radiology Department (click for profile). We are NOT referring to that person.

1st consideration you should be aware of before getting surgery in Seoul

There is a slightly unknown practice among the Korean plastic surgery industry to charge a slightly higher price for surgery to foreigners than to the native Koreans. This is partly due to the fact that most foreigners who specifically come to the country for cheaper cosmetic surgery can’t speak the local language. If they spoke the local language, they would be able to talk to dozens of the local clinics to find the best deals on Cosmetic Surgeons.

2^nd Big consideration

There is rather sneaky tactic done by people who write fake positive testimonials for the surgery clinics on the various online forums, like Purse Forum, etc. The fake positive testimonials often end with a message saying that if the person who went in the surgery mention the referrals name, they will get some type of insider’s discount. Of course what really happens is that the referral is a sales person who gets a percentage/commission for every patient they refer to the surgeon.

This factor has been mentioned on websites like on the forums and blog postings on My Seoul Secret and the Limb Lengthening Forum on the thread “Why We Lost Trust and Left“

From reading the threads on the forum, the main reason why the new LLF forum was created was because the people who opened the LLF believes that the SysOp of the older Make Me Taller forum was secretly Apotheosis, who is accused of getting a commission for all people who go for surgery who mention his website or name. There is supposed to be some type of unknown business deal made with the accused SysOp (who is believed to be Apotheosis) and Dr Sringari and Dr. Sarin, and other surgeons who have been heavily promoting their specific method.

Update July 16th, 2014: In a sort of strange coincidence I received a private email message by someone going under the name John. The following message was written…

“Hi, i have enjoy reading your blog, you clearly are a intelligent person who is looking to provide real information exposing all the snake oil salesman. I saw that one of your link in “Forum” is to MMT Forum, maybe you are not aware that the website is a scam too, but only much more dangerous. You can find information on google by searching make me taller exposed. The details are all there. People have been hurt because of information manipulated by the webmaster Sysop who invested money on a couple of cheap indian doctors and promote them via mmt. He also invested in other doctors and delete negative feedback about them. He claims to be impartial……..The details of all these are very long, so take your time to uncover the why and how of it all. I suggest you consider put some kind of warning that mmt is potentially a dangerous website as the information there is known to be edited or even faked. “

Our Reply: At this point, we have to be completely objective about all the drama that is sort of occurring right now in the grow taller/ height increase website community on the internet. We have no idea what is really going on. We just report what we find on the other websites and let other people sort out their own interpersonal relationship dynamics. If the SysOp admin from the MMT is really promoting bad surgeons to make commissions then that is their choice. They might be misleading people to put themselves into dangerous situations. We are possible consumers just need to educate ourselves and be more informed.

We understand that money can be a very seductive force. Selling, Advertisements, Commissions, Referrals, that is something that will always exist. We will not say that those are bad things since that is the way millions of people around the world earn a living to feed themselves. Cheating or Lying to someone for profit is morally bad but it will always exist.

As for ourselves at Natural Height Growth

Let me be clear right now and say that here at Natural Height Growth we are NOT affiliated with any surgeons or medical clinics which offer the limb lengthening surgery. We do reviews that are as objective as we can make it. Sure, there might be some slight biases but we are trying out utmost to be completely ethical about what we do.

The only affiliate program we are part of is the one with Amazon. We are a part of the Amazon Associates Affiliate program and make on average about $2 for every bottle of supplement (around $40) that is bought through our links, which is not often. I’ve already posted clippings showing the monthly commissions earned from operating this website in previous posts, which is usually less than $10.

We have managed to find his Youtube Channel which allowed us to upload a few of his videos below. To see the his profile, Click Here. His website is at www.BKLL.org

Fzd9 key height increase protein

Fzd9 is upregulated in cartilage formation.

Since fracture healing often involves endochondral ossification, similar processes as those involved in fracture healing could induce height growth in intact bone. As for whether a gap is needed for longitudinal bone growth remember that bony bridging can be overcome. And it may be the limited pool of progenitor cells that limit growth and not the prescence or absence of the gap. S1p-ko mice are capable of forming new growth plates from this progenitor cell pool.

Fzd9’s role in height increase seems to be later and relates to the conversion of the cartilage to bone. So Fzd9 will affect height increase per chondrocyte but will not create chondrocytes in the first place.

The below study does provide us with the insight that the periosteum is the location of the key region of progenitor cells that can undergo growth plate chondrogenesis and increase height. How do we get these stem cells past the cortical bone and into the bone itself where they have potential to increase height?

The wnt serpentine receptor frizzled-9 regulates new bone formation in fracture healing.

“The serpentine receptor Fzd9, a Wnt receptor of the Frizzled family, is essential for osteoblast function and positively regulates bone remodeling via the non-canonical Wnt pathway without involving β-catenin-dependent signaling. Here we investigated whether the Fzd9 receptor is essential for fracture healing using a femur osteotomy model in Fzd9 (-/-) mice. After 10, 24 and 32 days the fracture calli were analyzed. Our results demonstrated significantly reduced amounts of newly formed bone at all investigated healing time points in the absence of Fzd9 and, accordingly, a decreased mechanical competence of the callus tissue in the late phase of fracture healing. In contrast, cartilage formation and numbers of osteoclasts degrading mineralized matrix were unaltered{So could Fzd9 not be linked to growth plate formation?}. Canonical Wnt-signaling was not affected in the absence of Fzd9 in osteoblasts as well as in proliferating and mature chondrocytes within the fracture callus. The expression of established differentiation markers was not altered in the absence of Fzd9, whereas chemokines Ccl2 and Cxcl5 seemed to be reduced. Collectively, our results suggest that non-canonical signaling via the Fzd9 receptor positively regulates intramembranous and endochondral bone formation during fracture healing, whereas it does not participate in the formation of cartilage or in the osteoclastic degradation of mineralized matrix.”

“Wnt4, Wnt5a, Wnt10b, Wnt11 and Wnt13, Wnt receptors, including Fzd1, 2, 4 and 5, the co-receptors Lrp5 and Lrp6, β-catenin and Wnt target genes, including Runx2, a transcription factor associated with osteoblast differentiation, were up-regulated in the facture callus during bone regeneration”

“FZD9 is one of the genes, whose homozygous deletion in humans induces Williams-Beuren syndrome, a disorder associated with multiple manifestations, including low bone mass”

According to Statural growth in Williams-Beuren syndrome, Williams-Beuren syndrome does reduce height.

“After 10 days, most of the callus was composed of cartilage and fibrous tissue. New bone formation, which started at some distance from the fracture gap near the periosteum, was significantly reduced by 45% in the absence of Fzd9, whereas the amount of cartilage was not significantly affected”<-So the periosteum is where the pool of chondrogenic progenitor cells resides and Fzd9 does not appear to affect to conversion of these progenitor cells to chondrocytes.

You can almost see the stem cells flooding into the fracture gap of the bone. Note that this region of stem cells seems to extend slightly beyond the region of the fracture gap in d24 and d32.

“bone marrow stromal cells derived from Fzd9-knockout mice exhibited a diminished capacity to proliferate and form mineralized matrix”

Original Grow Taller Website www.growtaller.com and Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd. Review

Here is a rather lengthy post I have been wanting to write for the longest time but never got around to do it.

Out of all the websites on the internet that have ever promoted the idea of height increase and some type of product, system, or technique to grow taller, I would say that the website www.growtaller.com is probably the oldest one in existence. Checking back using the WayBack Machine, it seems that this particular website has been around for a very long time, in internet terms at least. I would guess that this website has been around since 1998-1999!

There are some unique and important information that is going to be release in this post. First, this website www.growtaller.com has been on the internet for about 15 years so far. If you type in the term “Grow Taller” into say Google, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo it shows up among the top 20 results usually for most countries. I have been trying to get this website Natural Height Growth to go up the rankings for that specific term for almost two years and it just can’t climb up the Google SERPs. At this point, I realize that somehow the major search engine companies can’t recognize a high quality, real website based on their algorithms. Somehow they do take the age of a website into account and having a 15 year old website seems to really help its search rankings.

So based on the science, posts, and hundreds of experiments of hopeful teenagers and 20 year olds over the last 15 years, it has been conclusively been proven that whatever the owner of the website www.growtaller.com was trying to sell didn’t work that effectively. On that website, the owner signed off using the name Ken Kalsi who holds the company Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd.

A person on the Impartial Height Increase Discussion Boards (with network 54) posted back in September 2006 about the fact that he/she bought the “How to Grow Taller” book back in 2003 and it talked about this technique called Myofascial Release. It seems to be a newer version of rolfing.

Someone did reply back to them in saying that they gained 1 inch at the age of 40.

Yesterday I decided to let Google and a few other less well known searching software to search the internet to see what can be found about the company and the person. What is revealed is sort of interesting.

There is at least 6 different people that is mentioned with the last name of Kalsi. They are in no particular order….

Ken Kalsi – This name is the one that signs off on the www.growtaller.com website
Kanwaljit Singh Kalsi – This is the name of the author of a book posted back in 1999 on Amazon entitled “How to Grow Taller: A Comprehensive Guide and Revolutionary Exercise Program to make You Grow“. That book is still listed on Amazon. You can find it by copying and pasting the exact book name onto the Amazon search box.
Harry Kalsi – This is the signature given for the sister website The Relief Zone (at www.reliefzone.com). He is labeled as an Electronic Technologist.
Mr. Nirmal S Kalsi – This is the real name used by the Canadian Government in official government forms given to the guy about issue with Tariffs.
Kanwal Kalsi – This is the signature used for the website Relief Zone and for the website
Harjeet Kalsi – This is the name that is actually listed on the administrative information for the website information background check.

If I was to guess, this is a family operation. the two real names used is Nirmal S. Kalsi and Harjeet Kalsi. I am not sure if the middle name of Singh is real or not. What was shown on the Short Support website page for scam companies of fake grow taller product websites was that the majority of scammy companies and websites associated with growing taller and selling height increase pills and products originate from Canada.

There is a total of 4 websites associated with the Kalsi name. They are the following….

www.growtaller.com
www.growingtaller.com
www.reliefzone.com
www.relaxica.com

I have studied back pain before so I would guess that the company trademarked name Relaxica is a nice play off of the lower back pain condition sciatica and the word relax. I immediately guessed that the website www.relaxica.com was a website that sold a unique type of lower back massager for back pain removal. However, I was wrong.

This Relaxica is a sort of facial massager is to remove migraines, headaches, tension, and stress in the head and neck area. From a document that google results showed, it is a vibrating device that has a strap and mask that is used on the head and face. This was revealed about a Robert B. Swierupski , the Director of Specialist Division of something called the National Commodity back in 1999.

The company Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd. is a real company. They have been listed on the BBB, which is the Better Business Bureau. From what I can tell there seems to be two primary businesses with the company.

The first one is that they buy some type of manufacturer wheel (maybe car wheels like chrome wheels) from a manufacturing company in China. The name of the company and address of the Chinese factory is (or was)

Name: Changshu Daeyong Import & Export Xo.
Address: Room 419-424 Block C, Ganggao City, No. 263, Haunghe Road, Changshu, Jiangsu, China

What they actually import or export from/to china are Wheels Models.

The real address for the company Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd. is

7075 – 126B Street, Surrey, British Columbia – V3W 6G3, Canada
Email: hskalsi@rogers.wave.ca
Email: hskalsi@home.com
Phone: 604-572-8141
Fax: 604-572-8141

The fake address they had given was…

Company Representative: Harjeet Singh Kalsi
1733 H St. Suite 330-988, Blaine WA, 98230, USA

The Address listed on the Relief Zone website

Address for Relief Zone: 988-1685 H. Street, Blaine, WA 98230 – Fax: 604-572-0355

The port that is actually used is the Seattle Port. They get their products from something known as Chingtao.

For those people who don’t know what the Ltd. is – from the Wikipedia article – private limited company (Ltd.) – a type of company incorporated under the laws of England and Wales, Scotland, that of certain Commonwealth countries and theRepublic of Ireland. It has shareholders with limited liability and its shares may not be offered to the general public, unlike those of a public limited company (plc).

The Ltd is a very common type of suffix used say Inc, Corp, or LLC used in the US. If you look at many of the companies started in India, China, Hong Kong, and other regions and countries which have at one point in the last 3 centuries been subjugated by the older British Empire, many of the company used the Ltd. suffix to indicate that they are a company.

(Legal Talk: This is a sign that they are a private corporation. If the company fails, the debt collectors like collection agencies who the owners of the company owe money to can not come after the owners by suing them and take away their personal assets (ei house and car), but only what is part of the company.)

Overall Conclusion

The company is absolutely real. They actually do imports & exports. From some information I managed to find, they seem to be importing from a Chinese manufacturing factory through the port of Seattle a type of wheel used for automobiles.

As for the website owner’s desire to venture into the field of height increase and pain relief and pain treatment methods, I would say that they were very clever in buying the website domain name before anyone else. It is clear that they were thinking ahead of everyone else before the 2000s.

Over the years they have been selling various different products. Some people on the Impartial Grow Taller Discussion Boards say that they had at some point been selling the Kimi Height Increase Insoles as well as pills. At this point we can’t validate those claims.

What we can determine is that the website is very high in the rankings for websites which are trying to rank for the word “Grow Taller” in almost every single major search engine, although there has been no new information added to the website for probably 8 years now.

This person, whether their name is Nirmal Kalsi or Harjeet Kalsi, obviously has moved on from this endeavor. We would guess that the website did get a lot of traffic and had people emailing the admin back during the years of 1999-2006 but over time people got wiser to the tactics used by internet marketers and the sales letters they had.

On a side note, I did some research on the Surrey area of the greater Vancouver Metropolitan area and it seems to be of a predominantly South Asian community. I would conclude that the person who originally created the website was most likely South Asian, and probably did have a middle name of Singh, suggesting that they were Indian, from the Punjabi region of India, and were Sikh.

So what this person a total scam?

I think at some level, the person was NOT being a complete scam. While I did not spent the $35 to buy the old grow taller document from the Amazon product page, the fact that they did create a rather sizeable book, with clearly written up stretching exercises, and went in depth on some exercises, like the myofascial release showed that they did their research to some level, at least on the aspects of physical therapy and spinal decompression.

If they ever did claim that they can make a person who was 30 years old 4-5 inches taller, obviously that would not be true. I don’t think at any point they claimed that their stretching exercises and book would let them do that. If they instead claimed that they can help people ever grow taller, that would be sort of true.

For people who have completely closed growth plates, they can indeed increase their height. Stretching their torso would give them at most 1.5 Inches in extra height, which would not stay. Of course that is the fine print that is no completely shown on the sales page unless you are are looking specifically for the catch.

If you wanted to see where all the data above in the post was found from, you can download the Zip file I created from the numerous clippings I did on research findings on the website HERE.