Quote from: Uppland on April 26, 2015, 02:01:31 PMThis guy is right, unless you are severly malnourished your height wouldn't have changed much. Your body size was already determined before you were born, accept it.
Incorrect. You don't need to be 'severly malnourished' to lose some of your 'detemined height'.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X14000665
QuoteThe dramatic increase of height in Europe starting during the late 19th century is closely linked with the beneficial effect of the industrial revolution. Our comparisons show that this effect is manifested in generally higher standards of living, better healthcare, lower children's mortality, lower fertility rates, higher levels of urbanization, higher social equality and access to superior nutrition containing high-quality animal proteins. In the past, some of these factors may have been more important for a healthy physical growth than they are today and some of them are important only in certain regions, but in general, the most important exogenous factor that impacts height of contemporary European nations is nutrition. More concretely, it is the ratio between proteins of the highest quality (mainly from milk, pork meat and fish) and the lowest quality (i.e. plant proteins in general, but particularly wheat proteins). Besides that, we discovered a similarly strong connection between male height and the frequency of certain genetic lineages (Y haplogroups), which suggests that with the gradual increase of living standards, genetic factors will increasingly be getting to the foreground. Even today, many wealthy nations of West European descent are ca. 3 cm smaller than much poorer countries of the former Eastern block with the same nutritional statistics. Another evidence for this genetic hypothesis recently appeared in the study of Turchin et al. (2012), who found systematically higher presence of alleles associated with increased height in US whites of North European ancestry than in Spaniards.
Remarkably, the quality of nutrition in the wealthiest countries shows signs of a marked deterioration, as indicated by the decreasing values of the “protein index”. This can illuminate the recent deceleration/cessation of the positive height trend in countries like USA, Norway, Denmark or Germany, which was routinely explained as the exhaustion of the genetic potential. In our opinion, this assumption is still premature and with the new improvement of nutritional standards, some increase still can be expected.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/4/1088.2.full
QuoteIn summary, in our prospective study, we observed a height gain in the children who consumed a high amount of cow milk. Milk is regarded as the best nutritional support for neonatal growth and development. In pubertal children, cow milk may also be an important nutrient for growth and for achieving optimal bone mass to prevent osteoporosis in later life. Finally, height gain in children may depend not only on the calcium in cow milk but also on some of its bioactive components.