Healthy World
Height Gain & Growth
Nourishing growth through the tender years.
Height is roughly eighty per cent genetic. The remaining share is mostly nutrition, sleep and health during the growing years - which is worth taking seriously, because it is the part anyone can actually influence, and only while the growth plates are still open.
What supports growth
Adequate calories, first of all - chronic under-eating in childhood is the largest nutritional brake on height worldwide. Enough protein, from dal, milk, eggs, paneer and soya. Calcium and vitamin D for the bone itself. Iron and zinc, both commonly short in Indian children's diets. And sleep, because growth hormone is released mainly during deep sleep, which makes a child's bedtime a growth issue rather than a discipline issue.
The plates close in the late teens. Everything on this page matters enormously before then and not at all after.
Being straight about the products
Height-increase powders, pills and devices sold to adults do not work. There is no supplement that lengthens a closed growth plate. Anyone marketing one to a grown adult is taking money for nothing.
Talk to a paediatrician if
A child is consistently well below the growth chart for their age, has stopped growing, or is growing much more slowly than their peers. Growth failure has treatable causes - thyroid problems, coeliac disease, growth hormone deficiency - and they are worth finding early.
Worth having
Picked to go with what you have just read. We only list ordinary, widely available things.