We know our response to this one is going to be greeted with howls of indignant protest from moms all over the world… But the answer is no.
There is no special “growth factor” in milk. Not that milk and other calcium-rich dairy products aren’t wonderfully nutritious. Calcium is essential for helping promote stronger bones. And if you don’t get a sufficient amount of calcium in your diet, your body compensates and basically steals it from your bones. This can eventually lead to osteoporosis-a steady, progressive loss of bone density that can cause people to become hunched over as they get older.
Height is the result of a complicated assortment of genetic factors and environmental interactions. It is polygenic-which means that many genes are involved. This is why sometime children are significantly different heights than their parents. (The legendary basketball player and sex machine Wilt Chamberlain was 7 feet 1 inch. But neither of his parents rose above 5 feet 9 inches.) And height is multifactorial. In addition to the complex genetic component, many lifestyle factors-especially the mother’s diet and health while she is pregnant and the nutrition of the child during the growth years-determine whether a person will attain his or her potential genetic height.
FYI-within the last hundred years or so, the Dutch have gone from being the shortest people in Europe to the tallest in the world. The average Dutch man today is 6 feet 1 inch. The average American man is only 5 feet 9 1/2 inches.
Height is a critically important subject for Leyner. Although he ultimately achieved the imposing stature of 5 feet 7 inches, he was a shrimp of a kid. In an autobiographical account he wrote recently for Best Life magazine, he explains that his adult obsession with weight lifting “was a long overdue response to the cumulative traumas of having been picked on as a small boy. My parents doted on me as if I were some delicate, Proustian genius prince, but once I left the cultured confines of my own home, it was Lord of the Flies out there. As my father’s career as an attorney flourished, we moved frequently, and every first day at a new school presented a mew gauntlet of bullies…” Leyner goes on to describe the following shocking scene:
“We’d just moved from Jersey City to West Orange, a seemingly benign middle-class bedroom community in the Jersey suburbs. One afternoon, on the way home from school, I’d followed a squirrel into the woods. (As an itinerant child who was typically friendless, I often found great solace in the companionship of small helpless creatures.) There I was with my fey Truman Capote blond bangs and sparkly anime eyes, and as I tried to lure the squirrel closer with a tiny marzipan banana that my mother had packed as a surprise in my lunch that day, I was set upon by a pack of boys in blue uniforms. Crazed, sadistic Cub Scouts. It was like a scene from one of those Japanese schoolboy splatter films like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. ”
