Today I found a rather nice article that shows that scientists can now grow bones from using plastics. I will copy and past the entire article here.

Neo-organs: Scientists use plastics to help the body make new bone

January 15, 2001
Web posted at: 11:21 AM EST (1621 GMT)

(CNN) — Physicians tell us the human body is a marvel of engineering. It can adapt to survive in many different environments, it can build muscle to grow stronger and can even heal itself. Its major flaw is it doesn’t come with spare parts. But scientists are working on ways to address that — at least for one body part. They’re developing exciting new strategies to make new bone.By David Terraso
CNN.com Associate Editor

Imagine a day when you show up to the emergency room with a broken leg. Instead of putting your leg in a cast for an entire month or two, doctors inject the fractured site with a plastic liquid that hardens in about a week, providing enough support for you to walk on it.

But this scaffolding provides more than structural support, it actually helps your bone heal. Built into the plastic scaffold are proteins called growth factors, which are released as the plastic degrades inside your body. The proteins help entice blood vessels from the healthy surrounding bone to invade the damaged area, bringing nutrients that the new tissue needs to survive. After a while, all the plastic has safely disintegrated, leaving you with new bone where the fracture once was.

While healing a broken leg is certainly important, this technique, if perfected, could also be used to replace bone destroyed by cancer, or in a spine fusion to treat a ruptured disk. By fusing two vertebrae together, the surgeon can eliminate the pain.

Current strategies

Each year an estimated 300,000-600,000 patients have bone fractures that require doctors to augment the body’s natural healing process. Additionally, many patients have conditions in which large segments of bone are destroyed or must be removed.

Currently, if a patient needs new bone, the best way for the doctor to obtain it is to perform an autograft — to scrape the bone from another site on the patient’s body, usually the hip. Taking the bone from the patient’s own body does two things. It eliminates the possibility that the tissue will be rejected by the immune system, and the growth factor proteins and stem cells in the scraped bone help it grow into new bone as well as induce the surrounding healthy bone to grow into it.

While this technique works, it’s akin to robbing Peter to pay Paul, leaving the patient with a damaged hip. Since the scraped bone is in tiny pieces, it provides no structural support. And there’s only so much bone that can be harvested, so if a patient needs more than his hip will give him, doctors often resort to a second technique known as allografting — taking the bone from a deceased donor.

Allografting has its own problems. Because the tissue is dead, it has none of the growth inducing properties the living bone has. But it provides more structural support, because doctors use an entire section of bone from the donor, rather than just bone scrapings.

From plastics to people

The challenge facing researchers is to find a material that has the structural support of the allografts, while having the growth-inducing properties of the self-harvested autografts. The ideal material would also be able to degrade safely inside the body, leaving only newly formed bone behind.

Dr. Antonios Mikos, a chemist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and vice president of the Tissue Engineering Society, thinks he and other researchers have found that material: plastics.

“The biggest problem in engineering organs is getting the blood supply to them,” said Mikos. Plastics may offer a way to solve that problem.

Even if the doctor can get new bone to form, unless blood can get to the new tissue, it will die, leaving the patient no better off than before the operation. So the trick is to encourage cells and blood vessels that are already in the surrounding area to grow into the new bone. Loading plastics to release proteins known as growth factors could do just that.

The main advantage of using plastics is that they can be injected, eliminating the need to cut open the patient. Their weight-bearing capacity can also be adjusted, depending on their chemical make-up, to be as strong as a thighbone, or lighter and more porous, such as a jawbone.

Another big advantage of plastics, said Mikos, is that scientists can control the rate at which they degrade. Tuning these plastics to degrade at the same rate as the new bone is formed is extremely important. If they disintegrate too quickly, they lose structural support — if they don’t disappear fast enough, new bone will have trouble forming. To make matters even more difficult, the plastic will have to degrade at a different rate depending on which bone it is in and how much weight the bone has to carry, Mikos explained.

Researchers have already been using certain plastics, which already have FDA approval for specific uses inside the body. But since no single material can work for every bone, Mikos is trying to develop new kinds of plastics that will be specifically designed to work as, say, a thighbone, or a vertebra, being able to handle the proper load and degrade at the correct rate for each bone. It’s a difficult task, he admitted, but one that has great promise.

In addition to inducing surrounding cells to make bone, another strategy researchers are pursuing is seeding the plastic scaffolds with stem cells. Taken from bone marrow, stem cells have the ability to turn into many different kinds of cells depending on the environment they are in. The stem cells on the scaffold would turn into bone themselves. For patients who don’t have enough bone-growing cells in the surrounding area, such as the elderly, smokers, or patients who’ve undergone radiation therapy, seeding the scaffolds with stem cells will allow bone to grow where it otherwise would not have been able to.

“The main obstacle to the stem cell approach is in large defects, larger than half a millimeter. The cells on the interior of the scaffold tend to die because they can’t get enough nutrients from adjacent blood vessels,” said Mikos.

One solution may be to seed the plastic scaffold with both the growth factors and stem cells, but for patients such as those mentioned above, the growth factors wouldn’t work very well. It’s also unclear how much growth factor is needed in humans. The initial animal research showed the growth factor proteins work well, but as scientists test this method on species that are closer in makeup to humans, they find they have to use a lot more of these proteins, which may not be safe in these high doses. Fortunately, there is some promising research that hopes to get around this problem.

The natural solution

“Scientists have long known that exercise helps maintain and strengthen bone,” said Dr. Robert Guldberg, a biomechanical engineer at the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues.

Creating mechanical stress on the bone can help stimulate bone to repair itself. Using this idea, Guldberg is working on using a hydraulically activated implant inside the injured area to accelerate healing by putting stress on the bone defects.

“During normal function, bone is a load-bearing tissue and strategies for engineering bone regeneration must therefore consider the mechanical loading environment in the body,” Guldberg explained.

He could also use this system to force the nutrients from the surrounding cells into the interior of the defect, allowing those cells to thrive.

In keeping with his philosophy of mimicking the natural healing process, Guldberg is also growing cartilage scaffolds in the lab and implanting them into bone defects. During normal fracture healing and growth, cartilage produces growth factor proteins among other things that entice surrounding cells to make new bone. The benefit of using cartilage over plastics may be that “since it’s the natural scaffold for bone anyway, there might be a natural tuning of the scaffold degradation process with new bone formation,” said Guldberg.

Custom-fitted parts

Growing bone inside a particular defect is one thing. In some patients there is still the problem of forcing the new bone to grow into a particular shape. For a patient with cancer of the mouth, part of the jawbone sometimes needs to be removed to prevent the cancer from spreading. Replacing the diseased bone with a new one that looks and operates just like a healthy jawbone is extremely important in helping the patient resume a normal life.

Dr. Michael Miller, deputy chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, is working on using plastic molds to help grow new bone into specific shapes.

A big problem in dealing with patients who have cancer is that many of them have to undergo radiation therapy, which harms many of the bone-producing cells in the surrounding tissue, said Miller. So it’s particularly challenging to grow new bone in those areas.

To address this problem, Miller has been developing a new method based on filling plastic molds with ground up bone from autografts and placing them next to the patient’s hip. This technique accomplishes two things — the mold forces the bone to grow into a particular shape so it can be custom fitted into the defect, and since the bone is growing next to healthy tissue, it can use the undamaged cells to form blood vessels and new bone, potentially overcoming the radiation problem. So far, Miller has tested this technique in sheep with encouraging results.

Combining the fields of gene therapy and tissue engineering, some researchers are trying to induce the body to make more growth-inducing proteins. Dr. Scott Boden, a spine surgeon at Emory University who works with Guldberg, has discovered a gene that encodes for a bone-making protein called Lim Mineralization Protein. By genetically engineering cells to make more of this protein, scientists hope to encourage bone growth.

“One of the applications being tested is to relieve back pain by implanting these genetically engineered cells in between adjacent vertebrae, causing them to fuse with new bone formation,” said Guldberg.

Although there is still a lot of testing to be done before any of these techniques become part of everyday medical practice, researchers are optimistic they are on the right track.

“Since no single technique is going to work in all situations, pursuing several strategies increases our chances we’ll be able to treat the wide range of conditions that affect patients,” said Guldberg.

The day when we can grow our own spare parts may not be that far away.

While this technology can not be directly used to increase our height through just adding some of the plastic to the ends of our bones, it can be used in collaboration with others to create a height increase method. The article found from the boards is a rather old one, back from 2001. You can get to it by clicking HERE.

Note: I have to admit right now that a lot of the articles and posts I create from now will be from many of the boards and forums I visit which I have on the Resource Page. I will always link them and reference Where I got the initial idea from. If you wanted to read more on the idea, click on the links, check out the boards and read the other people’s comments. Thank you.

So here is a very interesting study done by a group of Russian scientists researchers. The Institute the researchers are affiliated with is the Cell Technology Center at Russia’s Veterinary Academy. Apparently they went into sheep’s hind legs, cut them open, and inserted a porous implant where stem cells were added. The implanted eventually dissolved into the bone and the stem cells started to turn into the tissue around it, the bone and that meant that the leg expanded from the new bone cells.

The article is posted

Sheep with model’s legs

Plastic surgery knows hardly any limits in making women as beautiful as they can afford. Even the most undistinguished clinics can provide their clients with breasts of any size and hourglass waists. However, long legs have until recently remained beyond their wildest dreams – until Russian surgeons invented a stem cell technique and tested it on sheep.

Until recently, the Ilizarov frame was the only option to lengthen or reshape limb bones, as well as to treat complex and open bone fractures. However, any woman whose self-esteem is impaired by not having legs up to her neck will soon be offered a different way. That path is not paved with roses either, but even high technology cannot cancel the old truth about beauty knowing no pain.

Specialists from the Cell Technology Center at Russia’s Veterinary Academy have completed a four-year experiment to extend bone tissue. They have tested their method on a hundred sheep, implanting in their hind leg bones a porous implant (matrix) impregnated with stem cells taken from the animal earlier. In fact a sheep’s legs have comparable structure and bear a similar load to human ones. The experiment has successfully led to the implant’s biodegradation and replacement with absolutely natural living bone tissue.

“This technique will help lengthen limb bones by up to 8 cm, and only because muscles and skin cannot be stretched further,” said project leader Alexander Teplyashin. In addition to fulfilling many women’s wildest dreams, the new technique will be widely used in disaster medicine. It will help treat survivors with problem bone fractures who would have otherwise faced limb amputation.

“It will become possible to replace the fractured part of any bone, even the skull, with a stem cell matrix,” Teplyashin said. Dr Davud Dervishov, head of the Academy’s immunology department, shares his colleague’s enthusiasm.

The project is now pending official approval of clinical tests. So hopefully, the women looking with envy at models on glossy covers won’t have to wait long.

Kommersant

Me: From the forums, it is generally concluded that this could become an alternative to the traditional limb lengthening surgical process that is available today developed by Ilizarov. There will not be any internal metal implants inside a person’s leg. The problem with this alternative method is that now the inhibiting factor is not the bone, but the muscle and tissue around it since muscle and tissue cannot stretch beyond say 8 cms in length in such a short amount of time. With the Ilizarov method, the muscles and surrounding muscles are elastic enough so they can be stretching by 1 mm each day for a long time. So far, the method is not commercially available and I suspect won’t be available for cosmetic surgery use to help short stature people for at least another 10 years. 

The articles this topic was originally taken from are HERE and HERE. For the forum discussion about this, click HERE.

So this was a new method or technique that I discovered while looking through the message boards and was mentioned quite a bit. Most people have agreed that it is a scam or that it DOESN’T work. However, I still wanted to mention it because it is something that one could look into if one was truly inclined. I would recommend that if one decides to try it to get in contact and talk with the method’s creator before trying it.

Apparently there are these people popping up that offers their services which does “Body Remodeling”. I found only 1 website that talk about this approach. So maybe it really is just one person with a method with a service. They are at www.bodyremodeling.org and their claim is that they are ” the latest technique to increase body height with body shape improvement “without surgery”. They claim to go to your house and help you grow taller since there is no actual physical clinic. For me that is okay since my company is online and mobile. I have a PO Box as the mailing address for my company.

This is from the Techniques Page

“Body Remodeling Technique” is a very recent technique, generally depending on traditional physical therapy techniques, not only to make the muscles and nerves take the desired shapes, but also it molds the bones themselves to the desired shape and volume.

Our bodies, physiologically, are continuously changing through organized and coordinated destructions and creation of different cell types: skin, blood, muscles and of course bones.
Our bodies evolve and adapt themselves according to external pressures and events. Thus and according to the nature of our professional, social, personal and hygienic lives, our body responds with what fits it to keep it healthy and insure its future.

“Body Remodeling Technique” is based on the change of the ratio of external pressures and events surrounding us, hence the targeted body segment responds gradually by changing the necessary cells to improve the shape according to the wish of the therapist. The most obvious implication for Body Remodeling would be without a doubt OVERALL BODY HEIGHT INCREASE.

Currently, multiple techniques inducing height increase do exist. The most important and most reliable technique – besides Body Remodeling – is the surgery called “the Ilizarov technique” where the leg bones are cut and the two parts are retracted daily by 1 mm with the aid of a specific machine.
Many problems might occur with the use of the surgery mainly: pain, infections, osteonecrosis and bone bending, added to many long months during which the subject must be bedridden, in addition to the high cost of this technique.

There are other techniques such as hormone therapy and drug therapy of course associated to all their side effects and unreliability.

On the other hand, the “Body Remodeling Technique” depends on 3 sections:

1. Physical Therapy:
Specific techniques and specialized equipment will aid the mild evolution of bone and muscle cells and increase its speed, under close monitoring and control.

2. Specialized Machine:
This machine is used to simulate specific external pressures and events, it is custom made to each subject, according to his or her body measurements. It helps the graduate increase of bone length with the least pain mentionable.

3. Sporting Exercises:
The exercises are necessary to insure the correct and healthy evolution of muscles and nerves in parallel with the increase of bones length during the treatment.

The results obtained by this “Body Remodeling Technique” are more than satisfactory, where the candidates gained an average height increase of 1.5cm (more than ½ inches) per month with no specific limits.

In addition, there are no limits regarding the age or gender of the persons that can benefit from this technique, keeping in mind that physiologically, there are 4 variables that influence the monthly increase average: age, gender, weight, and bone type.

From a biological and physiological point of view, everything they stated is true but I can not say that what they offer really works. The claim is that the average height gain is 1.5 cm per month. Now if this thing works, that would be mighty impressive. .

This is from the FAQ page

4. What is your technique and how it works?

This remodeling technique is called Non-Invasive Bone Distraction divided in two parts:

a. the machine

It is custom made; this means that every subject has his own machine, which he or she takes home with them. It is a complicated and secret mechanic system. It looks like a cervical collar, you know the sponge collar; it is also worn the same easy way. Every segment of the legs has its own machine, so for lengthening the legs a person would need 4 parts each one for a different segment 2 for the thighs and 2 for the legs. These machines permit full range of motion of the lower limbs joints, so it is possible to wear them under the clothes at home but they a little bit unestethic to go out wearing them. So by strapping this machine for at least 6 hours a day preferably 8 hours, and most specially during sleep. They help the bone grow taller. There is no pain and no irritating discomfort especially when the subject is used to the machine. But the machine in itself can do nothing without the physical therapy.

b. Physical therapy

In the beginning, the treatment consists of 3 sessions per week where different P.T. techniques are done to help the bone react to the machine. Then this number of sessions will be reduced, up to the time where the wanted height is achieved then the machine must still be worn but the P.T. techniques are stopped permitting the bone to stop remodeling. We should mention that the subject must follow a rigid muscle stretching and strengthening in parallel usually for 1 hour a day (1/2 in the morning and ½ in the evening). Naturally there are some advises that will be given before and during the treatment about nutrition, health and other subjects.

Me: There is a lot more in explanation you can find from the FAQs section HERE. From What I can see, the machine appears to be some form of rough padding that one wears. They say one can get 4-6 inches on average after many months or a year, I am not entirely sure. I would have to say that the site is very informative. After looking through the website, I looked around the internet on what others have said about this new method or product. This is taken from the great resource and blog Quest For Height written in June 2010 By Tyler Christopher Davis.

Body Remodeling Review – Tuesday, June 15, 2010

I have been in contact through exchanging emails with a person named Harald Oberlaender in the last few days who had started the Organization Biomedical Growth Research Initiative. On a previous post, I had stated the organization was most likely a scam since it had an address which was a PO Box in Israel while Harald was from Germany. From the very first page on the website here the person was asking for a donation for the project HERE.  Apparently this project has been going on for 9 years now, 5 years since he posted on the Make Me Taller boards and he still hasn’t been able to get the funding of around say 300,000 to begin the first part of animal testing.

So far I have decided to retract that statement of the organization being a scam and wait to see if Harald will sent me the idea proposals so I can see that the initiative has a real intent. I have signed a NDA and will not go into the specifics but will only state whether the ideas the researchers created are even viable. I do have a degree very close to Biomedical Engineering and the Chemical Sciences. In the internet space, one has to have a very good Bullshit Radar.

From a financial and investment point of view, I understand the challenges he faces. I guess there was a few interested investors but no one was willing to put their money where their mouth was. Speaking from experience from what I know about VCs (Venture Capitalist) and Angel Investors, it really is VERY difficult to get money from them. Often before people are willing to put money in, they want both 1. Some proof of concept through a physical product and 2. Evidence that other people have invested.

Since the project is only on paper and has no actual physical manifestation, investors are unsure if the idea even works. Plus, there has been not one person who has given money yet, so clearly no one is going to be the first to step up. Usually the first investor who puts their hand in the pot is the one who loses. If one has ever worked for any length of time in the financial sector, say investment consultant, they would know the horrible numbers that biotechnology companies have. Very few ever survive long enough to get their product approved and out to market. Most run out of money because they did not realize how long of a “runway” they need for the venture.

So, I am sitting here waiting for Harald’s reply email with the papers so I can look over them.

I was asked this question years ago by a friend when I tried to explain to them the extensive number of benefits to having height as an advantage in life. Ever since then I have asked myself that question maybe once every year and I have found that my answer has evolved as I become more educated on how people behave and economics.

What most people do when they are asked this type of question is to avoid giving a definite answer, often because they are afraid of being politically incorrect and offending someone else. So the most common answer is not some number they pull out of their head but a ,” Well, it depends…” or “How do you define the word “ideal”?” or “Are we talking men in only the US or across the world in general?”

One thing that life has definitely taught me is that when one tries to give a definite exact solution to any question, one has to consider all the possible situations. For any questions that become even slightly theoretical or metaphysical, the answer is almost always impossible to answer with a definite solution.

Life Lesson: Hard questions can never be answered to a satisfactory level for everyone who wants an answer. 

To answer this type of question which does involve subjective biases and preferences, one realizes that the answer may only satisfy 55% of everyone who reads such a post.  However, I am trying to gain the agreement of the majority of the readers beliefs and biases.

Let’s first set up some constraints and parameters so we can focus the answer down to only a few possible answers.

1. We are only talking about men for now

2. We are only talking about people from the USA, including say Alaska and Hawaii. It has been shown from previous posts that the height averages for different countries vary too greatly in a huge range.

3. Let’s assume we are talking about the white caucasian american. (I do realize that it is a race label)

4. We understand that the ideal height is different for different people, so we will actually have 2 different ideal heights.

Humans are social creatures so when we are talking about “ideal” height” we are really talking about the preference and opinion of other people. That means that whatever one’s own opinion of one’s height is removed from the equation. We are only talking about how other people view one’s height. How do they look at you based on your height ,assuming everything else in your life is the same?

When we are talking about the fact that different people have different opinions on their optimum height FOR YOU, their answers will be varied.

For men, the issue of height really has 2 primary social/interpersonal relationship functions, one for women and the other is for other men.

Function # 1: To gain the admiration, desire, and attraction from women

Function # 2: To gain the respect and awe (and maybe even jealousy) from other men

That is why I felt that there should be two different ideal heights, one for women for function #1, another for men for function #2.

Let’s look at function #2 first. When you are a male and you meet and confront another male, at some unconscious instinctual level, you are sizing them up. The easiest way to size up another man is through their size. Size is used to showcase domination, fitness, strength, and physical prowess. If you are taller than the other people, your eye level is above theirs and you can literally “look down on them”.

However, the subject is not as simple as being taller is always better. At some critical point, the emotion of awe and respect other men might give you might turn into ridicule and sympathy if you are too out of societies constructed social rules.

The late author Michael Chrichton who was 6’9″-6’10” himself had stated that the optimum height for men in the US  was 6′ 6″. Here is a Harvard Medical School trained doctor who has been a best selling writer multiple times over stating such a claim. Thinking from a completely pragmatic point of view that does make a lot of sense. The average height of normal wall in american houses is 6′ 8″. One’s hair might add 0.5-1 inch to the height. If we then add the fact that most shoes add around 1-1.5 inches to ones height, we realize that 6′ 6″ is the upp er limit in height that one can be without any hindrances that can develop because of how buildings are created.

There are some small cars that are being developed these days that maybe a guy who is 6′ 6″ can not fit into, but the large trucks that are still sold can still house a man of that size quite comfortably. In terms of shoe sizes, there are many stores that sell pants and shirts with larger inseams and shirts these days. When one asks other grown men  who are the most popular and most admired strong American males (let along from the African American community) , the names Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant appear often and they are both 6′ 6″.

These days it is actually really hard to find great male role models. A lot of young guys these days don’t have male heros they can look up to. In sports, the athlete that has come close to achieving immortality in the last generation was probably Michael Jordan. Sure there are the people who admire Bruce Less but for some people, it is really hard to relate to him because he had the foreign element about him. Plus, even though Bruce was strong and ripped like crazy, he was reported at 5′ 7.5″ feet tall, which was very averaged sized for an asian guy from his era. If you walked by him on the street , you wouldn’t know that he was someone special. He however learned how to overcompensate for his limitations of being asian and average sized to become a legend. However, that legend happend only after his death. There are other types of heros like Gandhi, Einstein, and Steve Jobs but they were never of the size that could instantly bring forth respect and awe form men just from their physical presence.

So the first guess for the ideal height of men FOR men is 6′ 6″. At that height, from other men you command respect and illicit awe while not pushed to a level where you are viewed as some form of anomaly.

Now let’s look at what the ideal height is for function #1. If we go to any internet discussion board that asks women what is their ideal height for men, many of them say that the taller, the better. (Reference Link 1)

Of course it is important to understand what a person says and what they actually do are 2 different things. It is reasonable to say that a 5′ 2″ female would like in theory and her mind to date a guy who is 6′ 8″ since he give her some form of mental security but in actually that could be very mechanically difficult. I am imagining a lot of awkward head tilting, neck straining, and uncomfortable positions…but that is just me.

Recent scientists concluded that women prefer on average to have their ideal male mate be 11% longer in height to their own height. So a girl who is 5′ 6″ would on average like a guy who is slightly longer than 6′ 1″. (5′ 6″ = 66 inches –> 66* (1.11) = 73.26 inches)

From the Wikipedia article on human height found HERE we learned from from 2003-2006, the average height for adult white male is 1.79 meters or 5′ 10.5″. I used to live close to Idaho and traveled a few times through the Mid West area where many towns are still primarily caucasian and I can tell you through just my own experience that the number provided by wikipedia is rather small, especially for the younger generation of guys.

However, let’s assume that number is correct. so from a SI unites pont of view, the average height is ~ 1.80 meters. Now, girls in general want the taller guy. They want a guy who is better than average, say by 1-2 standard deviations. I would assume no one chooses intentionally to “settle” for someone who is less in any way than the average. The US usually refers to the smaller length unit as inches, not centimeters. So if a women was to give a minimum height requirement, they would usually say 6′ 0″, which is 1.83 meters in SI units.

However, there are so many caucasian american guys who are  6 foot so they are not really “tall”. It is true that we can continue to add another inch and see if the american female’s opinion of the guy changes. 6′ 1″? still considered average, but getting cuter. 6′ 2″? Maybe 40-50 years ago that was the golden standard that people wanted to reach, but people have grown taller since then. 6′ 3″? Now we can reaching a level where a guy can be classified as “tall”. There was some study done from data collection that showed that only 3% of all people in the US was 6′ 3″ or taller so if you are at that hieght, you are in an elite group of individuals. Of course, that  study had combined the numbers of males and females so the real percentage was probably 6% of all men was 6′ 3″ or taller, which is still a nice elite group one can be in.

For many girls, 6′ 3″ could be considered the ideal height, but let’s continue to add th inches. 6′ 4″? There seems to be quite a few athletes these days at the height getting a lot fo exposure like Michael Phelps and Dwayne Wade. However, we must also remember that most women don’t focus on sports that much. Movies and TV is still a very popular way people absorb the media. If we look at the most famous male actors which are considered attractive like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Or Chase Crawford, or Channing Tatum , none of them are on the “tall” side. They are either average height or slightly below average. Thus, we can conclude that the admiration, desire, and attraction we want from women can be developed without the need for great height. Women care more about how you make them feel and the emotions more than anything. Maybe it used to be that the ideal male was the larger than life, rugged, tough men from decades before but women this days prefer a more real life sized man. Some women do choose not to date really tall men because they look strange.  Many women have called 7′ 6″ Yao Ming scary because he looks like and is the size of Frankenstein’s monster. However, that doesn’t mean that they have shut off that primitive part of their brain to desire tall men. So what is the standard deviation from average do they really desire in their men?

So the real question is, where is that height that balances size and looks?

I conclude that the ideal height is 6′ 3″, maybe slightly taller at 1.91 meters in SI units. If you look at a lot of the lead actors in action movies these days, they can often be classified into two groups by height. They are either the average sized joe who is agile and smooth. Think Daniel Craig in James Bond (5′ 10″), Matt Damon or Jeremey Renner in the Bourne Series (both 5′ 10″), Robert Downey Jr. (5′ 9″), and Colin Farell from Total Recall (5′ 10″). Then you have the larger sized male leads who are taller , broader, but not as agile or quick. Think Josh Duhamel in Transformers series (6′ 3.5″), Dwayne Johnson (6′ 3.5″), Gerard Butler (6′ 2″), Brandon Routh from Superman (6′ 3″), or Chris Hemsworth, the guy who played the lead in Thor (6′ 3.5″).

So my point is that the Hollywood movies these days have officially separated the male leads in say action movies into groups based on size. You can have either the average sized actor playing the lead like Brad Pitt (5′ 11″) or the slightly larger actor playing the lead like Ryan Reynolds (6′ 2″). These images have reached the subconscious of the average american female and when they say that they want the “tall guy” to date, they are reaching back into their memory of the movies they’ve seen and choose the guy who is 6′ 3″.

And that is my proposed guess on what the ideal height for the American women is , 6′ 3″ (1.91 meters)

A while back ago I had written an article asking the question “How many 8 feet tall people are in the world?” Turns out the answer was 3 currently at this time who are alive. There is another person who could be the 4th but there is sort of a controversy over that issue so me and few other height enthusiasts decided to leave it as it is for now.

I guess it was only appropriate and a matter of time before I wrote and tried to answer this question. So….

“How many 7 feet tall people are in the world?”

Of all the people in the world, I personally really believe that I am one of less than 100 people in the world who know as much about height and height growth who could possibly answer this question

The only other person who can possibly answer this question is someone who does actually has studied Auxology which is the official scientific name for the study of human growth.

Here is my answer

I am going to use a combination of mathematics, statistical reasoning, real life situations and personal observations, hours and years poring over height related literature, and some “hand waving guesstimation”.

This is what I do know. I have lived in a variety of countries in my life with some of the biggest variability in the size of the resident’s bodies. I have lived in super crowded cities over 20 million people and have lived alone close to the woods in the middle of nowhere.

In each of our brain, there is a part in the back of our brain called the R.A.S. , the reticular activating system which is always subconsciously looking for what we choose to consciously seek after. Some people prefer to focus on people’s eyes so when they walk by a lot of people, they only notice and can describe people’s eyes from memory. Other people look at the ground and are fixated on a passerby’s shoes. That is what they choose to focus on.

We get what we choose to focus on. Well, I focus on height. When I walk past a huge group of people, I look for people who are either abnormally tall or abnormally short. They are the people I notice the most. Of course, they are also the most easily noticeable.

I used to live in Seattle, WA. In the last census taken in 2011, it was reported that Washington State has about 6.8 Million people. Hell, most people don’t even answer the census that comes in their mail anymore (If you do, you are better than me since I always forget). So we could say that the real population of the state of Washington could be maybe 10-20% bigger than the census reports. Instead, we should be collecting the numbers by the number of social security numbers given out and the number of people who arrive in the US with a passport and never had a ticket to leave the country.

Next, we have to take into account for people who are in the state illegally. If we assume the influx of illegal immigrants, we can increase that to say another 3% , assuming that 1 out of 30 people in the state is there illegally. However, we have to remember that probably the majority of the illegal immigrant are from down South, from Mexico or other Central America countries. Sure, there might still be human trafficking through say a ship or cargo loader from the sea. but those numbers should be a lot smaller than the people who just walk past the border. I would assume that not many Canadians try to flee down south through the border into the US.

What I am trying to do with the first part of my arguement is get the most accurate guess of the real population of the state of Washington as possible. So my guess is that instead of the 6.8 million reported by the census, the number is probably more like 8 Million, which is around a 15-18% increase.

From my daily walking and people watching this is what I have figured out. When I was living in the USA, in Seattle which has a population of only 500,000 I would see a 7 footer or someone very close to 7 foot maybe once every 1.5-2.5 months. I have never seen a 7 footer and saw them again. In the last year, I have seen maybe 4-5, one every 2.5-3.5 months but this year was very unique because the rate that I see them is a lot higher than previous years. Of course if I go on more large gathering places like a fair or concert, I would see a lot more.  The city of Seattle has around 620,000 people.

I would say that I personally have seen maybe 10-15 people who are 7 foot tall or taller in my life. This is the part where I have to guess. Since I saw those 4-5 7 footers in Seattle in the last year, I would guess that there is maybe 1 7 footer for every 300,000 people in the state of Washington. that comes out to be about 27 7 footers in the state of WA. Now that does sound a little high but I would assume that WA is one of those states that height is higher than average of other states. If we than use that 1/300,000 people rule that comes out to be about 1030 7 footers in the USA.

Since there is about 7.1 billion people in the world, we could just divide 7.1 billion by 300,000 to get 23,600 7 footers.

Now that number is too high. I admit that my first calculation seems to be off, maybe even by 1 entire magnitude.  The main reason is because most of the world is NOT tall, say really around 1.65 meters tall averaging out both men (5’8″) and women (5’3″). The average is smaller so the number the total world population has to divide by should be bigger.

We also have to take into consideration the fact that certain groups of people seem to be genetically bigger than others. In the last post, I had shown that there was 16 7 footers from Serbia at least from the Tier 1 level of professional basketball male players. Serbia has a population of around 7.2 million people . I would guess that the real number of 7 footers in Serbia is probably 40, or 1 7 footer for every 200,000 people.

If we compare that to say Vietnam, the ratios would be completely different. Vietnam has a population of almost 90 million. Guys who are 1.8 meters and girls who are 1.7 meters tall are considered tall there. For a native Vietnamese to get to be 1.9 meters is incredible, but our standard and desire is to move that cut off point by 2 more decimeters, which could be 3-4 more standard deviations away from the already deviated average. to more than 2.1 meters. 7 feet is 2.13 meters.

I would guess  that in the country, there is probably 5-6 people over 7 feet. So 1 7 footer out of every 15-20 million people, taking into account and including people who might be suffering from gigantism and acrogemaly. This is all assuming that there is are probably a few 7 footers hidden from public or the media for fear of publicly exposed. People do treat people of extraordinary height in a way that make them feel like a sideshow or displayed animal sometimes.

This is the best number I could come up with for the number of 7 footers in the world. Multiply the the total world population by a number that is about 30% larger by 1 less mangitude in value compared to the ratio value used in the US calculation which is 1/2,300,000 to give around 3090 7 footers in the world. 

so V2= (V1/10)*(1.30)

So the final calculated answering using pure reasoning is that there is about 2800 7 footers in the world currently, including for unknown ones, giants who have avoided the media out of privacy and fear reasons, and those that might be inflicted with medical conditions causing their large size.