Nutrition

Baum starts off with an obvious fact that most people know: milk promotes strong muscles and bones. She acknowledges that it's something we've all been told as kids, but it does hold some truth. Milk is high in calcium which helps with bone density, but we don't know much of it is due to height. Sure, there have been studies showing that children who drink milk are taller than those who don't, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the milk caused that height difference.

A study from 2018 covering subjects from when they were born until they reached age 17 showed that they grew a smidge taller if they drank one more cup of milk per day than they usually would. However, the results only covered those from well-educated, well-off families that had no issues with food shortage. Plus, other factors like diet quality or other key nutrients weren't taken into consideration. Baum says that even though milk won't give you a height boost, it's still key for strong and healthy bones, which in turn can help your body grow more.

Isadora Baum is a certified health coach and a freelance writer for not only Men's Health, but also for Bustle, SHAPE, Women’s Health, Prevention, POPSUGAR, Runner’s World, Reader’s Digest, and many more. As she writes for many health-related news sites, she is a reliable source to look into for nutrition information. Her article doesn't seem fitness-biased like some health coaches would be, and the information is recent and relevant. I can use this article to help break any myths readers have had about milk helping you grow, whether they believed it as a kid or not.

In "Does Milk Help You Grow?," Ansley Hill starts off with a lot of quick facts about milk, most of which are common knowledge but are still helpful. She also mentions how kids who drank milk were at lower risk for stunting in their growth, but it's also because kids who have access to milk to drink live in developed countries where access to other food is also easier. Milk also contains a lot of other nutrients and vitamins other than calcium, so scientists think milk in relation to growth is at least partly due to how many nutrients the drink provides. Hill notes that milk isn't the only thing that kids can eat to obtain these nutrients, but it's the most affordable and convenient because it provides all of those benefits at once, so it's one of the best things to include in children's diets.

Hill also brings up some dangers with allowing children to drink milk at too early of an age. She recommends that cow's milk be given only to children 1-year-old or older, and even then suggests that they drink no more than 2 cups per day or opt for breast milk or powdered milk formulas instead. Hill warns that if milk is given to children younger than 1-year-old or is drank too much by those older than 1-year-old, it's possible that the child may become iron deficient and/or anemic (meaning your body won't produce enough red blood cells to carry oxygen throughout your system).

Ansley Hill is a dietitian and clinical nutritionist from Oregon. She earned a degree in nutrition from Georgia State University as well as having completed an internship in dietetics at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was also awarded the 2019 Recognized Dietitian Award by the Oregon Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. This article was written only a year ago and has a lot of relevant information written by Hill, who seems qualified to write about this stuff. I can use the information from Hill to support everything from Isadora Baum's article, as the information is quite similar and the topic of milk consumption during infancy relates to my topic.

“How We Get Tall” by Atlantic health writer Olga Khazan informs readers about the reasons behind the phenomenon of height variation. Khazan mentions that nutrition and sanitation are big determinants of height, whether it was within or between different populations. The statistics presented by Khazan within the article show that those in better living conditions (i.e. closer to white-collar) showed a taller average height. It makes sense that a country like the Philippines is known to have shorter people. It is an island nation that isn’t that big yet is still highly populated. Khazan says having larger families living in impoverished conditions in busy developing metropolitan areas will inhibit disease easier and food won’t be as readily available.

When Khazan compared Americans to Europeans, Americans were taller than Europeans by a few inches during the 1800s. Europeans eventually surpassed Americans in average height during the 1900s. Khazan says this is likely because many European countries have better healthcare and nutritious food available compared to the lack of healthcare and fast, overly-processed, artificial foods of the U.S. The points made by Khazan (alongside the statistics, of course) will be helpful to my topic considering living conditions and nutrition go hand-in-hand, which supports the idea that height can vary among different parts of the world.

This article was written by Olga Khazan, a writer for the Atlantic. The Atlantic is a well known news organization, so there should be no worry for it coming from a suspicious website. As for the author, Khazan, besides writing for the Atlantic, has also written for other news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Forbes. She won the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship award twice and the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing. As for the credibility of the information itself, it seems to be more informative than biased and persuasive. Khazan adds hyperlinks to mentioned studies and statistics done for heights in different countries’ people, as well as infographics and charts with a description and the creator’s name.

Viegas begins by introducing the tallest men in history, the Gravettians. They were a group of people that lived during the Paleolithic era mainly in the Balkan countries. Viegas mentions an anthropology researcher at the Masaryk University in the Czech Republic named Pavel Grasgruber, who said this group of people relied heavily on hunting mammoths for survival. This provided them with a protein-heavy diet and a low population meant enough food to go around. Fossils found hint that Gravettian men were about 6'0 tall on average while the Mayan men in South America were an average 5'2.

Grasgruber said that nutrition and socioeconomic factors play a big role in height, so he's confused as to why some of the poorest Balkan countries have some of the tallest men. Grasgruber and other scientists discovered a gene called I-M170 affected height, and this gene was found in a Gravettian man that lived in Southern Italy 33,000 years ago. He retraces back to nutrition and quotes another anthropologist named Carleton Coon who stated that the Dinaric Alps in the Balkans have a large amount of limestone. This limestone has a lot of minerals, which when mixed with the natural water, could have contributed to healthy growth for the Gravettians.

Jen Viegas is a journalist for Seeker, a digital media company under Discovery News and also a co-publisher for the San Francisco Bay Times. In addition, she has written for numerous other well-known news organizations as well as authored many books covering health, cells and the human body. This article is both recent and the information seems reliable. I can use the hypotheses from the anthropologists mentioned in the article to compare the ideas of height being more dedicated to nutrition or genetics.