When I first started writing on the website, I remember that people were talking about this supplement combination which was supposed to help you grow taller. M.E.N.S.

That was the acronym used for sleep, exercise, niacin, and melatonin. I wanted to talk about melatonin.

I recently started to take melatonin just to help me sleep and I remembered that I never really did much research on Melatonin. A quick Google Search on the link between melatonin and the possibility that it can help you grow taller reveals many of the older posts written maybe 4–7 years ago, derived from the now dead GrowTallForum.com website.

People believed in this supplement combination. Melatonin was promoted a lot by people of that old forum because the thinking was that since it helps you sleep, and growth hormones are primarily released when you are sleeping, melatonin would mean you have a greater chance of having growth hormones being pushed into your system.

I looked at the link. Is there something there?

I refer to 7 studies, some of them recently published just in 2014.

• Increased melatonin concentrations in children with growth hormone deficiency.
• Geographical Distribution of Adolescent Body Height with Respect to Effective Day Length in Japan: An Ecological Analysis
• Melatonin enhances chondrogenic differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells.
• Effect of Melatonin on the Proliferation and Differentiation of Chondrocytes from Rat Vertebral Body Growth Plate In Vitro
• Melatonin Modulates the Proliferation and Differentiation of Human Growth Plate Chondrocytes: Poster #311{Tyler-What’s notable about this study is that it states that Growth Plate Chondrocytes express two melatonin receptors MT1 and MT2.  It states that Melatonin stimulates the differentiation of GPCs but inhibits proliferation which could increase height as differentiation is more important than proliferation for height}
• Melatonin combined with treadmill exercise suppresses aberrant chondrocyte behavior in osteoarthritic cartilage via TGF-β1 upregulation (LB834)
• Abnormal Response of the Proliferation and Differentiation of Growth Plate Chondrocytes to Melatonin in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis

The 3rd study suggests that Melatonin does have this ability to turn MSCs into the chondrogenic lineage. Other sources (#7) says that for the growing child, over-expression of melatonin in the system can cause abnormal chondrocyte growth. It turns out that young kids who have idiopathic scoliosis actually have longer bones (vertebral column and arm length) than their peers. The curvature of the vertebral is because the anterior region of the vertebral is growing faster than the posterior region.

Out of all of the 7 studies, I felt that study #1 was the most insightful.

Short stature is most often caused by 2 ways.

1. Idiopathic Short Stature (ISS)
2. Growth Hormone Deficiency (GHD)

It seems that for children who suffer from GHD, they have GHD because of the overexpression of melatonin.

This means that based on this 1 studies, when we generalize the conclusion, it seems that having too much melatonin in the child’s system is bad for their height. However, this condition is something that can be medically treated, unlike ISS, which most family doctors would say makes the kids “genetically predisposed to be short later in life”.

So while MSCs might be helped slightly by Melatonin, too much Melatonin is a bad thing. Referring to study #5, the conclusion states the following for peri-pubertal children. – “These findings indicated that melatonin could inhibit the proliferation and stimulate differentiation of GPC (Growth Plate Chondrocytes) in human”{Tyler-Actually this could be a thing for a height growth as peak chondrocyte hypertrophy is more important than chondrocyte proliferation for peak height growth}

Taking Melatonin does not work. Try to figure out another type of supplement to take to sleep easier.