Is it possible to grow taller?

Okay this may sound a tad strange but I would really like to know if it is possible.

Is there any excercise or food/drug that will significantly cause a person to grow taller. For instance at age 20 you will be 5ft 8 inches tall. Now with the excercise or food/drug could you instead be say, 6ft 2inches or so.

If anyone knows a precise and working method to growing taller please let me know. I understand there are obvious benefitial foods and excercises such as drinking milk and taking your vitamins and playing sports such as basketball or volleyball (things that make you jump)…Well I want something more than that.

Thanks in advance…

(in fact I am more interested in just longer legs, thus making you taller, than the whole body growing longer)

Once you’ve reached full maturity, there’s probably not much food or drugs can do for height – the growth plates in your bones fuse in adolesence.

There are surgical procedures to lengthen the legs, but they sound quite unpleasant.

Finally, there’s human growth hormone, which can increase height in children.

3waygeek is right. Humans growth is stimulated by growth hormone. People with acromegaly keep putting out growth hormone in adulthood. Unfortunately, only the wrong bits keep growing, jaw hands feet, ribs. This might not be completely bad , you could end up in the movies - Andre the Giant (famous wrestler turned actor starring in such films as The Princess Bride), Richard Kiel (James Bond’s Jaws) and Carel Struycken (The Addams Family’s Lurch) were all acromegalics I believe. The fact they were so big probably indicates their disease started before adolescence.

Anyone here see Gataca? What about that scene where they perform some surgery to vincents legs to make a few inches taller, so that he can pass off as Jerome? Looked exruciatingly painfull, but does it work IRL?

Alternately, you can either be in a coma for several months, which will make you grow about 6 inches and settle down to about 4 inches taller than your original height, or you can hang yourself without dying overnight, which has the same general effect.

not only do you get taller, but having longer legs (not too long) on iether males or females is very attractive

How do you grow 6 inches by being in a coma?

When you lay on your back for a very long period of time your spine settles out.

You’re slightly taller in the morning than you are in the evening- it’s the same principle.

So when old folks break their hip and are bedridden for months at a time the grow HALF A FOOT???

I am disbelieving.

I don’t know about exact measurements generally, but I know a girl who was 6’ and after the coma was 6’6. She went down to 6’4. YMMV. No idea if this is common, but it does happen.

Do you know what her age was at the time? If she was a teenager, it could have been just a normal ‘growth spurt’.

6’4" is an awful lot of woman. Maybe the coma was caused by Gigantism!

Doesn’t the “streching out” factor gradually degrade until you are the same height as you started?

If not, does it cause back problems for them later in life?

Hey I looked it to this.(Since at 5’ 9" I’m just average height. Yes, many of us guys would like an extra couple of inches. I guess I’m kind of annoyed that pretty much everybody in my mom’s family is at least as tall as I am, including the women. Of course all of my dad’s family is shorter than me.) Basically the leg legthening procedure consists of 1 to 2 portions. Each part gives you up to an extra 3 inches. What the docs do is cut either the tibia and fibula in both legs or the femur in both legs. A pair of external metal braces hold the bones in place with a tiny separation between the bones. As your leg bones try to fuse back together docs gradual legthen the braces. The docs continually to this over 6 months for either the top or bottom portion of you legs. The entire time you will be either on crutches or in a wheel chair. Afterwards you will need some rehabilitation to get the strength back in your legs. Oh, here’s the “Best” part. I found out that it would cost 70K to have the procedure done to the lower legs.(Apparently doing the femurs is more difficult and therefore more expensive since the docs have to effectively damage one very large bone.) I think if I want height I’ll look for shoes with heels and maybe sneek a lift in there.

Could someone elaborate on the hormonial drugs which could increase growth during puberty (like me)? Seems to be the most painless/cheap method, assuming it worked.

Are any available OTC?

A few of my female relatives also put on an inch or two during their first pregnancy, from the growth hormones in the bloodstream. They were in their early 20s at the time.

On a more extreme note, a family friend gained a few inches when he lost his legs and got prosthetics. The doctors wouldn’t agree to make him six feet tall, like he wanted, but he lied on the form where they asked his original height and got up to, I think, 5’8" instead of 5’6"